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IMPRESSIONS 

OF 

LONDON SOCIAL LIFE. 



IMPRESSIONS 



OF 



LONDON SOCIAL LIFE 



WITH OTHER PAPERS 



Qu' 



SUGGESTED BY AN ENGLISH RESIDENCE. 



BY 



J 

a: 



E/ S. N A D A L. 



v' SECOND EDITION. 






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S-^:'-> 



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NEW YORK: 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

1875. 



3/1 s?y 



Copyright, 1875, 

BY 

SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO, 



By transfei 

APR 6 191^ 



John F. Trow & Son, 

Printers and Bookbinders, 

205-213 /ifisf \-2tk St., 

NEW YORK. 



TO THAT CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN AND HONEST FRIEND, 

JUDGE JOHN P. O'SULLIVAN, 

3E btQ io Enscrtbe this Uttk §orik, 

WITH THE ASSURANCE THAT IN WHATEVER PART OF THE EARTH 

HIS FEET NOW STRAY OR TARRY, HE BEARS WITH HIM 

THE WARM RECOLLECTIONS OF THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 

This volume of Essays records the impressions 
received during a residence in London, where the 
Author was for some eighteen months a secretary 
of legation. It also describes things here as they 
appear to one who returns to this country after 
a stay in England. A number of these papers 
have already been printed in American periodicals. 

New York: January^ 1875. 



f 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

FACE 

Impressions of London Social Life ■ • • • i 

IL 

English, Sundays and London Churches ... 33 

IIL 
Two Visits to Oxford ..••••• 64 

IV. 

The British Upper Class in Fiction • • i • 90 

V. 
Presumption ••••«•••• 105 

VL 

English Court Festivities . • • • • ,110 

VIL 

English Tradition and the English Future • . 131 

VIIL 
Childhood and English Tradition • • • 141 



X Contents, 

IX. 

PAGE 

The Dancing School in Tavistock Square • . 148 

X. 

Contrasts of Scenery , .••••• *6i 

XI. 

New York and London Winters. < • • -173 

XII 
The Evening Gall 176 

XIII. 
Our Latest Notions of Repuklics • • • • 186 

XIV. 
English Conservative Temper . • . . • 193 

XV. 

English and American Newspaper-writing , , 197 

XVL 
Americans Abroad . . . - •» • • • • 209 

XVII. 
Society in New York, and Fiction • • • .217 



Some hnpressions of London 
Social Life. 



I WISH to record some impressions of London 
social life, and of that particular phase of it we 
call society. I may dwell upon some faults 
which, I should explain, are shared by society 
in all times and places — indeed, are quite in- 
separable from it, while others to be described 
are the peculiarities not so much of the country 
as of the age. Whatever be the defects and 
drawbacks of society, scholars and thinkers 
would wish to establish something like it, did 
they not see that, in many respects, that already 
established was unfit for their uses. Were it 
possible, they would want some common e^round 
where men and women mieht meet to taik 
and see and be seen. What they, with their 



2 Some Impressions of [i. 

very high intentions, would desire, the rest 
of us would find enjoyable. When the godsij 
had brought man into existence, they were still . 
puzzled by the formidable problem of how he 
was to be amused. It was supposed that some- 
thing more extended and complex than the 
original race v/ould be required for that pur- 
pose ; and numerous plans were submitted to the 
council of the gods, and were one by one rejected. 
At length one Olympian inventor arose and sug- 
gested that the members of the new race should 
find their amusement in looking at each other. 
This novel and audacious suggestion, though at 
first received with merriment and wonder, was 
finally adopted, and on trial was discovered to 
work admirably. It has certainly since proved 
itself to be the completest of all inventions, at 
once the most perfect and the simplest and 
most labour-saving. 

I have often wondered if something like the 
Athenian Agora could not be devised. One of 
the great features of Athens, I fancy, was the 
active intellectual interest the people took in 
their society as a spectacle. The liveliest 



I.] London Social Life. 3 

curiosity everywhere pervaded the community, 
and the stimulus of a public place of resort 
must have been great. Hither came men of all 
ranks and professions — merchants, poets, soldiers, 
sophists, and statesman. When Socrates or 
Cleon passed, every pedlar had his jibe and 
every huckster his bit- of scandal. The whole 
market-place was full of mirth, movement, 
gaiety, gossip, and curiosity. There is, at least, 
one modern institution which has some points 
of similarity to the Agora : I mean London 
society. The resemblance is one more of form 
than of character. It is like it in the fact that 
it brings numbers of people into association, or 
rather contiguity, and that in it we see con- 
stantly all the noted people of the day. Here 
the likeness ends : the life and variety are not 
there. 

Yet, easy as it is to find fault with, London 
society is far the most perfect thing of the kind 
in the world, and it must be a dull man who 
would fail to extract amusement and pleasure 
from it. Were it a little less hard and rude, and 
were there a little more liberty for individualities, 



4 Some Impressions of [t 

one might spend a lifetime in it with profit. 
As a spectacle, it is valuable for its profuseness, 
its pomp of life, the beautiful women and famous 
men we see. There is, moreover, something of 
moral education in it. We get a certain strength 
— of a kind, indeed, which we should not take 
long to acquire, and, having acquired, should 
not take a lifetime to practise, but still a kind 
of strength — silent resistance, and ease in the 
presence of people who are indifferent and 
critical. The dowagers are the persons in con- 
versing with whom one experiences the greatest 
growth of character. Some large and listless 
mother, whose eyes are following the fortunes 
of her charges over the field, and who has 
asked you for the fourth time the question you 
have already answered for the third — to go on 
discoursing to such a person as calmly and 
fluently as Cato does to the universe is a 
great and difficult thing. There is not a pleasure 
in it, nor indeed a rapture, but there is real 
growth and building up in a certain amount 
of it. 

But the moral education of society is scarcely its 



*i.'j London Social Life. 5 

most important, service. There is a larg-e class of 
men to whom success in it is the main object 
of hfe. To them it furnishes a profession, and 
one in which they are sure in time to succeed. 
He who in the bloom of youth is bidden to 
dance at some great lady's ball is sure, with 
average luck and persistence, to go to breakfast 
in his toupee. It gives the swell something to 
live for. When he has attained the Marquis 
of This, the Duke of That shines yet ahead of 
him. The way is plain, and there is no limit 
to the possibilities of its extension. From round 
to round of the Jacob's ladder of fashion the 
aspiring climber may ascend indefinitely. There 
is always something a little ahead. To tread 
all the ways of Mayfair, to sound all the depths 
and shoals of Belgravia, were indeed a hopeless 
task. But it has many sorts of uses for many 
sorts of people. Mothers there exhibit their 
marriageable wares. Politicians put their heads 
together. The Earl of Barchester asks a Cabinet 
minister to appoint a friend. But the old gentle- 
men who go to look on and take their daughters 
get the most out of it. It is especially pleasant 



Some Impressions of 






for them by contrast with the treatment they 
receive in this country. Here the fathers of 
famiHes creep about among their daughters' 
suitors in a very abject and humble manner. 
"What talk is there of fathers when there is 
such a man as Orlando ? " The old men in 
England are much more defiant and unmanage- 
able. They do not strike their flags to the 
young ones, as is their habit with us. They 
confront age with fine clothes, the locks right 
from the hand of the hair-dresser, and the air 
of success and authority. The condition of an 
Englishman who has grown grey in honours, who 
has a star and a decoration and the health and 
vanity to wear them properly, is by no means 
an unhappy one. (Decorations should be given 
to suit complexions ; kings and colleges should 
award blue ribbons to blond men and red ribbons 
to dark men.) If, besides his fortunate accidents, 
he has humour, sensibility, and an individuality, 
his is really an enviable lot. In the most rigid 
of societies, wealth, rank, and success clear a way 
for individuality! They make one elbow-room. 
An eccentric clerk in the Admiralty would very 



u] London Social Life, 7 

soon find himself on the curbstone ; the eccentric 
/nobleman, on the contrary, is a popular personage, 
and has a recognised position in all the novels. 
Even hard and supercilious people are not apt to 
question the wit and manners of one whom kings 
and learned societies have indorsed. A stare 
need not make him check his humour. He may 
be a strong and a natural person, if he chooses. 
It used to delight me to watch one old man 
who had run a career in literature and politics, 
and to whom the world had given all its good 
things. He protected himself with the best of 
Poole's tailoring. He wore a decoration which 
suited his complexion perfectly. He was none 
of your cravens. He met old age with hand 
gaily extended in the jauntiest, boldest way in 
the world. With a bearing humorously perverse 
and imperious, with a pair of yellow-grey eyes 
flashing over his eagle beak, he moved through 
the throng ; shaking hands pleasantly with many, 
complimenting the mammas, and hectoring the 
maidens, whose conversation he corrected with mock 
severity, and whom he cautioned against slang. 
Such of the young ladies as received his reproof 



8 Some Impressions of [i. 

demurely, he looked down on with approbation ; 
while those who were saucy pleased quite as well, 
as they gave him opportunity for more extended 
reprimand. If age ever retains the vanity, 
humour, and kindness of youth, this old man must 
have had a pleasant time. The only drawback 
is, that the people who to-night are flattered by 
his smile may, a week hence, be reading his 
obituary with that contempt we instinctively 
feel for a man who has just ceased to live. 
The death of a successful man of the world 
affects our way of thinking of him much as any 
other reverse in his affairs — the loss of his 
fortune, for instance, or the favour of his party. 
We cannot help reflecting that he must now 
take in a little sail, that he must in future abate 
a little his demand upon society. 

But for the average man the very last thing 
society does is to give him an opportunity to 
express himself Self-suppression is the lesson 
it inculcates by precept and by very strong 
example. The man of society must imitate the 
patience of the processes of nature. He must 
act as though he intended to go out for ever. 



i.| London Social Life, 9 

apd was in no hurry to get the good of it. No 
wise man attempts to hurry London society. 
The people who compose it never hurry. But 
i^ the man of society be unselfish and be careful 
to retain his sanity, its chief good is in what it 
offers him to look at — the carriages flashing 
back and forth at the dinner-hour, looking like 
caskets or Christmas-boxes with the most 
wonderful lining and furniture (the drapery and 
lace almost floating out of the windows), the balls 
and parties, the acres of fair-armed British 
maidens through which he may wander as in a 
wilderness, the odours of the midnight gardens, 
the breath of the dawn, and the first flush of sun- 
rise over Hyde Park as the drowsy cabman 
wheels him homeward and to bed. Every spring 
he may watch for the reappearance of some queen 
of the last season, as for the coming of the 
flowers. To a mind capable of pleasure it must 
often be a joyous and delightful spectacle, and 
always an amusing one. But if a man be subject 
to feelings of pique and envy, and allow fortunes 
better than his ov/n to make him wretched, there 
could hardly be a worse place for him. I knew 



lo Smte Impressions of [i. 

one man, foolish fellow ! who, instead of givingj] 
himself up to the admiration of the ladies, andl 
the graces and peculiarities of the dancers, had! 
held aloof and had been unhappy because people 
took so little notice of him. He told me that, 
when he saw . other men successful and smiled 
upon, he used to stand back and try to look 
*' devilish deserving." " Wisdom and worth were 
all he had." " I have since found out," he re- 
marked, " what a very poor expedient it was. 
For success in society, either here or anywhere 
else, I had as lief be accused of forgery as of 
modest merit.-" 

I found everywhere an excessive respect of the 
individual for the sentiment of the mass — I mean 
in regard to behaviour. In rnatters of opinion 
there is greater latitude than with us. Now- 
adays a man in England may believe anything 
he chooses ; the reason being, I suppose, that 
beliefs have not much root or practical im- 
portance. Authority seems to have left the 
domain of thought and literature, and to have 
invaded that of manners. Of the two sorts of 
tyranny, I think I should prefer the first I 



I.] London Social Life, ii 

should rather be compelled to write my poetry 
in pentameters, and to speak with respect of 
the Church and the Government, than to be for- 
ever made to behave as other people dictate. I 
know Englishmen do not accept this as .true of 
themselves. One of them, to whom I had hinted 
something of the sort, said, " Oh, I don't know ; 
we do about as we please.'^ Precisely ; but they 
have lived so constantly in the eyes of other 
people, have got so used to conforming, th?.t 
they never think of wanting to do what society 
would disapprove of They have been so in the 
habit of subduing whatever native individuality 
they possess, that they have at last got rid of it. 
Of course, it would be impossible to make them 
believe this. They mistake their inattention, the 
hostile front they present to the world, and their 
indifference to the strictures of foreigners when 
they are abroad, for real independence and a 
self-reliant adherence to nature. But there 
seems to me to be something conventional 
even about the rude and lounging manners 
of which they are so proud. It is like the 
" stand-at-ease " of soldiers. It would be highly 



12 Some Impressions of . [i. 

improper and contrary to orders to do anything 
else. 

Englishmen appeared to me to be criticising 
themselves away. It is not only among Englishmen 
of fashion, nor solely in England, that this is the 
case. The age everywhere partakes of it. It 
has come to attach great importance to proper 
externals, to seemliness, to a dignified and har- 
monious behaviour. What unexceptionable people 
in their private lives are the writers of the day! 
Artists used to be envious and backbiting : if 
they retain such feelings at present, they are 
certainly not candid. It cannot be that the 
world has made such progress in a few years as 
to have quite got rid of the passions of spite 
and envy. We fear the age has caught cold 
and the disease has been driven in. Certainly 
we have come to devote an exceedingly parti- 
cular and microscopic care to externals ; we give 
such attention to our walk and conversation, 
we are so careful to avoid faults and littlenesses 
of demeanour, that we seem to have acquired 
some sort of negative Puritanism or Pharisaism. 
This is true of ourselves, and it is true of all 



i[] London Social Life, 13 

I ■ 

educated English people ; but the disease reaches 
its extremest form among Englishmen of fashion 
and quality. I once asked one of the kindest 
and cleverest of them I knew, " Can a young 
man in this country read poetry to the ladies — ■ 
not his own, of course, but out of a book?'^ 
"No," said he, "that would be rather com-pro- 
mis-ing" (shaking his head and pronouncing 
the word slowly). On reflection, I did not 
remember having done that thing myself for 
some years, but I hardly had it classified as one 
of the things not to be done under any circum- 
stances. 

In this very great self-consciousness and doubt 
as to what to say and do, it was an advantage 
to have some particular tone set and the range 
of conversation narrowed within some well- 
understood limits. By this, language, as a 
medium of expression, is abolished, and becomes 
a means of getting along comfortably with 
friends. Certain things are set apart as good 
for men to converse upon — the races, horse- 
flesh, politics, anything in short, providing it is 
not discussed in a definite or original manner. 



14 Some Impressions of [i.| 

No man should say anything which might not be 
very well said by any one else. Each man has 
an infallible guide in the rest He must set his 
clock by them, and regulate it carefully when 
it inclines to go faster. The following is a 
simple and easily-understood specimen of a 
club conversation : — 

First Speaker. "Are you going to Aldershot 
to-morrow.'*" 

Second Speaker. " No." 

Here follows a pause of several minutes. 

First Speaker. "Why aren't you going to 
Aldershot to-morrow ? " 

Second Speaker. "O, I hate Aldershot." 

Here follows a pause of longer duration, during 
which the first speaker reads over the Pall Mall 
Gazette for the third time. 

Second Speaker. "Waiter, bring me gin and 
seltzer." 

This one might call the unit of a club conver- 
sation, upon which more elaborate remark may 
be superadded at will. 

We are of course always bound to pitch our 
voices to the ears of those around us. As a 



I.] London Social Life, 15 

rule, we must expect people to talk about trivial 
matters ; it would be a great bore if they did 
otherwise. But now and then we need not be 
surprised at a little genuine laughter or a hearty 
greeting between friends. But in the clubs, 
from what I saw, there rarely seemed to be any 
abandon or heartiness. There was roseate youth 
with the finest health, with beauty, with a 
flower in the button-hole, with horses to ride 
in the Row, with fine raiment and sumptuous 
living every day, with the smiles of mammas and 
the shy adoration of the maidens. Yet I have 
seen old men who seemed far more happily self- 
forgetful and with more enthusiasm for enjoy- 
ment. The young men have deteriorated from 
the energy of their fathers of forty years ago, 
who must have been a very amusing class of 
men. The strong pressure of public sentiment 
prevents these young men from acquiring the 
old physical vigour and freedom of the British 
upper class ; and as they have no task set them 
they are driven unavoidably into dulness. They • 
never swear, or rarely. The " demmes " and 
" egads " of their ancestors are quite out of em- 



1 6 Some Impressions of [t' 

ployment They even sin with a certain decorum. 
For instance, it is very " bad form " to dance 
with the ladies at the casinos, though there is 
no impropriety in leaving those places in their 
company. The few men who are literary and 
intellectual make, perhaps, the weakest im- 
pression. The thin wash of opinion which forms 
their conversation evaporates, and leaves a very 
slight sediment. They have that contagious 
weariness I have noticed in the agricultural 
population along the water-courses of Illinois 
and Missouri. In the latter it is the result of 
fever and ague, and the long eating of half-baked 
bread. The voices of those people seemed to 
struggle up from a region below their lungs, and 
in them the peculiarity, besides wearying, in- 
tensely repelled and disgusted. In men as 
charmingly dressed and beautifully clean as 
these Englishmen, the offensive quality was 
missed, but there was the same weariness and a 
vapidity that inoculated and subdued you. There 
often seemed to me an effeminate sound in the 
talk, not only of the intellectual sort, but 
even of the faster men. Should the ghosts 



I.] London Social Life. 17 

of their uproarious ancestors ever rustle through 
those halls of Pall Mall and St. James's Street, 
they must marvel, I fancy, to see the young 
bloods of the present sitting about and compar- 
ing experiences of vaccination with the minute- 
ness of old ladies at a religious tea-party. 

It is an old folly, it may be said, that of de- 
crying the present, and I may be reminded that 
most men are human, no matter what the age 
or the country in which they live. There is 
truth in that; but we may easily see how very 
different men may be whom centuries divide, 
when we consider that most important fact of 
the human mind — mood. How diverse are the 
thoughts and passions which rule the fast fol- 
lowing movements of a single human life ! How 
diverse the lives of individual men ! How widely 
separate from our own may be the feelings of 
men between whom and ourselves many years 
interv^ene, and of whom no living soul remains 
to speak. There was a day when people were 
less suspicious of each other than nowadays, 
when they were freer and far brighter. Talk like 
that of which we read in Boswell's ''Life of 



1 8 Some Impressions of [i. 

Johnson," " The Vicar of Wakefield," and the "Sel- 
wyn Correspondence" is not heard now. I have: 
noticed the fluency of some very charming old 
ladies. They address you with an unhesitating 
talkativeness, which is not of this time. They 
have never asked themselves, " How did I appear 
when I said this.?" or "Was not that gesture 
or that expression of countenance peculiar.-*" It 
would seem, then, that the monologue which 
is so characteristic of the novel of fifty years 
ago was no invention of the novelist, but that 
people really talked in that way. They did 
not skirmish behind wary short sentences as 
do the lovers in Mr. Trollope's books. Why, 
if you proposed to one of the young ladies 
of that period, she replied in a speech covering 
full a page and a half of Miss Edgeworth, per- 
fectly fluent and grammatical, every word of 
which could be parsed from beginning to end. 
If she rejected you, the discourse was sure to 
contain many and most irreproachable moral 
sentiments. Yet those very young ladies upon 
occasions could very nearly swear. On the de- 
corous pages of Miss Austin we find expressions 



I-] London Social Life. 19 

which nowadays would be considered wicked. 
The proper and satirical Emma, and the very 
charming Ehzabeth, say "Good God!" " My God!" 
Exquisite profanity ! It would have wheedled 
the heart out of a travelling colporteur with a 
bundle of tracts. Ah, fresh blooming maidens 
with the blue waving plumes, what joy it would 
have been to have met you, and to have heard 
from your own lips those shocking expressions 
some blissful morning long ago, on a breezy hill- 
top, and near the foliage of a rustling oak ! 

The complete banishment of profanity from 
the conversation of men of fashion seemed to me 
a curious phenomenon. I do not beHeve it could 
have been accomplished in any country where 
example had less authority. The common 
modern oaths you hear very little ; as to the 
archaic and Homeric forms, they have quite 
gone out. I never met a man, however aged, 
who used those expressions. I used constantly 
to see one old gentleman who always came 
arrayed in the traditional blue coat and brass 
buttons, buff waistcoat, and great neckcloth of 
the Regency. I fancied he might be like that 



20 Some Impressions of [i^ 

South American parrot of which Humboldt tells,, 
that was the sole remaining creature to speak: 
the language of a lost tribe. I never had the- 
pleasure, however, of hearing him express him- 
self He silently surveyed the moving throng. I 
The present, perhaps, seemed dull to him. He 
had heard, a fine May morning long ago, in 
Piccadilly, the horn of the coachman ringing up 
the street, and had awaited the stopping of the 
coach at Hatchett's, to see such blooming 
faces looking merrily out of the windows, and 
the ladies in the short waists and petticoats of 
the time alighting from the top. Somewhere 
away in one of those shires whose name recalls 
the green fields and the sound of the milk in the 
pail, he had kissed a country cousin under one of 
the big bonnets they wore when the century and 
he and his sweetheart were all in their teens. 

In the parlours the narrow range of thought 
and conversation is even more noticeable than 
at the clubs. Here the ladies set the tone ; and 
kind as they usually are, bright and pretty as 
they often are, there is unmistakably among 
them an unconsciousness of all outside certain 



I.] London Social Life, 2t 

narrow limits that custom- has prescribed for 
them. The freedom and gaiety which are not 
uncommon in the parlours of Americans of the 
best class will be hard to find in the drawing- 
rooms of English fashionables. They talk^ pro- 
fessedly. Upon those common topics which 
should form the ordinary conversation they do 
very well, and, among the brighter of them, a 
kind of wit and wisdom is permitted. But that 
is apt to be a la mode. The wit is badly watered. 
I am not sure, however, that fashionable wisdom 
and watered wit are peculiar to London. All 
society-wit is somewhat diseased. The wit of 
rich and idle men is poor. It is curious that 
they who have nothing to do but to make jokes 
should make such very poor ones. There are a 
few recipes afloat from which most of these fine 
things are evidently prepared. The fashionable 
joke is usually accompanied by the fashionable 
gesture, and an expression of inward illumination 
which the state of the mind hardly justifies. 
Though as to artificial pantomime and vocal 
inflection, there is less of that among the English 
** respectables " than among our own. It may 



22 Some Impressiojis of [i^. 

seem to contradict this, but really does not,, 
when I say that our own fashionable manners? 
are borrowed from the English. English people:? 
must speak in some way, and their peculiarities,, 
as a rule, are proper and natural Our imitative: 
and impressible society leaders, seeing something 
admirable in English aristocratical style, copy 
the accents and gestures, forgetting that they too 
would seem admirable to others were they to 
speak naturally. 

As a rule, women in English society are 
remarkably natural — negatively natural, I mean. 
English girls are particularly simple and un- 
assuming. They are innocent of all effort to 
impress or astonish. As all womankind does 
and should do, they make themselves as pretty 
as they can ; but as to personal superiorities, their 
educators do not lay enough stress upon such 
things to make them ambitious to excel in that 
way. All young ladies are taught a certain 
mode of deportment, which is excellent so far as 
it goes. The chief precept of the code, whether 
inculcated openly or by the silent feeling of 
society, is that each young lady must do as the 



I.] London Social Life, 23 

rest. That "young English girl," who is the 
theme of the novelists and the magazine bards 
and artists, easily merits all the adulation she 
receives. Does not all the world know, is it not 
almost an impertinence to say, that for dignity, 
modesty, propriety, sense, and a certain soft self- 
possession, she has hardly her equal anywhere? 
But the British maiden is taught that ambition 
in character is not a desirable thing. The natural- 
ness and propriety which accompany this state 
of mind are not particularly admirable. It is very 
different from that propriety which is the result 
of elevation of character, of conclusions intimately 
known and constantly practised. People who 
have activity and ambition are very apt to be 
affected, and very apt to unduly crave recogni- 
tion. That we ask to be thought superior, shows 
at least that we prize superiority. When the 
young are left to their own growth, and no restric- 
tive tariff is put upon individuality, we may 
expect a little nonsense. Society will certainly 
do a good thing for the young if it teaches them 
the folly of a desire for recognition. But this 
society does not do, I fear. It merely instructs 



24 Some Impressions of ' [i- 

them not to ask for recognition, because by so 
doing they make a bad impression. It has done^l 
them a still more doubtful service, if, in giving; 
them this very good trait, it has also taught themi 
to emphasise less strongly the superiorities off 
character and conduct. 

I have said that English-society people make; 
but little effort to impress or astonish; and I ex-- 
plained that they have no wish to be thought; 
individually remarkable, because that sort off 
ambition among them is a very exceptional! 
thing. What they do value is the "getting on;'" 
and the inevitable effect of living among them 
is to make one think that that is the best thing 
one can do. Certainly those old familiar ideas 
of the poets and moralists, " truth, innocence, 
fidelity, affection, &c.," which one always felt at 
home with in the snug corners of the parlours 
at the village sewing-circles, suddenly became 
strange to me and very unreal and whimsical. 
They danced off at a distance in the oddest and 
most fantastical manner. If anybody sneered at 
"upholstery," or spoke contemptuously of rank 
and fashion, you at once fancied some one had 



I.] Londo7t Social Life, 25 

snubbed him ; \{ he praised virtue, you suspected 
him of wanting a dinner. But while the lust of 
the eyes and the pride of life are everything to 
upper-class Englishmen, you hear wonderfully 
little said about these things. Carlyle and 
Thackeray, the poets and satirists and the goody 
old maids who write the novels, though they 
have quite shut the mouths of these brave 
gentlemen, have by no means driven such 
thoughts out of their hearts. To give you to 
understand that they are persons of consequence, 
they would think the last degree of vulgarity. 
Yet, if they do not claim consequence, it is not 
because they do not value consequence. They 
know that to assert openly their demand is not 
the best way to have it accorded them. The 
avidity of Mrs. Governor Brown and Mrs. Judge 
Jones for the best rooms at the hotels, and the 
recognition and sympathy of all the railway 
conductors, is unknown in England. But the 
two manners, so different apparently, are not so 
diff*erent essentially. Both demand consideration 
and consequence — the one only more successfully 
than the other. The quiet demeanour, the 



26 Some Impressions of [i. 

sedulous avoidance of self-assertion, the critical: 
look, the slightly reserved bearing, say . very, 
plainly, "See, I am a person of consequence.'" 
Both make the same inferior claim. The onei 
makes it in a wise, refined, and successful way;; 
the other in a foolish, vulgar, and unsuccessful! 
way. 

" Pose " is the name given to this wise, refined, , 
and successful manner of self-assertion. It may 
be defined as the quality of absolute quiescence.. 
By the aid of it we move with the semblance of ' 
unconsciousness through a throng of which we: 
are inspecting every individual. Society has dis- 
covered (what the young find it so hard to learn) 
that by looking quite blank we may keep people 
altogether in the dark as to what we are think- 
ing about. That which Mr. Phunky found so. 
difhcult — to look as though no one were looking 
at him — London society has learned to do. Yet 
I think that some other quality besides mere qui- 
escence is necessary to "pose.'-* That we will 
suppose to be some beauty (whether physical or 
spiritual) of face or form. An unconscious coster- 
monger would not be imposing. I have seen 



' 



I.] London Social Life, 27 

flunkies who possessed the quaHty to a greater 
degree than their masters, and who were yet not 
admirable. A thing must be beautiful absolutely 
before it can be beautiful in any one condition — 
particularly in that of rest. No doubt the young 
men are as fine-looking a lot of fellows as can be 
found. They have good physiques, which they 
keep in good condition ; they have had an edu- 
cation among people of breeding and cultivation ; 
they have been at the best schools, and brought 
away such culture as they could not help getting ; 
they have had respect and consideration from their 
cradles ; they know very well they have nothing 
to ask of society. But besides all this, they owe 
most to the pains which they lavish upon their 
exteriors. That last is an important point. Let 
Carlyle deride the Stultz swallow-tail. The Stultz 
swallow-tail and the white waistcoats, and the 
gold chains, and the wonderful linen, and the silk 
stockings, and the beautiful boots — these between 
them do work wonders. The young dons at the 
universities and the young clergy of England — 
than whom no finer race of gentlemen exists, 
candid, catholic, modest, learned, courteous — are 



28 Some Impressions of [i. 

yet not so beautiful as the men of Pall Mall and 
St. James's Street. The reason is that they do not 
so generally seek the outdoor Hfe, and especially 
that they give no such scrupulous and continuous 
care to the decoration of the ambrosial person. 

In English ladies, "pose" is particularly admired, 
yet I am not sure that the novelists do not make 
too much of it. The female phenomenon at a 
circus is trained to stand with one foot on the 
back of a galloping horse, and yet not for a 
moment lose her equable expression of counte- 
nance. Surely, then, it were no such great thing 
to teach a lady to move amid a throng of well- 
disposed people with the appearance of equanimity 
and unconsciousness. The ladies are beautiful, 
especially the younger and softer of them ; they 
choose to stand still, and the impression which 
is really due to some quality of face or form or 
spirit is ascribed to attitude. But I doubt if 
quiescence is the highest attainable condition of 
mind and body. Grace is beauty become ex- 
pressive and vital. That is the quality which 
must delight us while we move upon the earth, 
and we are not content with any state of things 



I.] London Social Life, 29 

which robs us of it. We shall not always be here, 
and we are impatient that whatever there is lovely 
in life should be in haste to express itself. Grace, 
I should say, was the expression of a beautiful 
past. ■ It finds egress, we know, in any sort of 
action — walking, sewing, reading, or singing — 
but most of all in dancing. Here, fortunately, 
the baneful influence of "pose" is counteracted. 
The ball seems to be the invention of some good 
friend of humanity to force people to be quite 
themselves. Self-indulgence and conceit generate 
ugliness ; virtue and self-denial beget beauty, and 
we know how necessary it is that people should 
always be expressing these things. No training 
of the body can eradicate vulgarity ; no awkward- 
ness or inexperience of limb can suppress grace. 
With what odious sensations the trained dancing- 
girls of the Alhambra afflict us! What inde- 
scribable pleasure some little creature's mistakes 
who blunders in the Lancers afford us ! 

" Pose " has been adopted by English people 
of fashion in self-defence. London and Texan 
societies have this one point in common — they 
all go armed, even to the women. As acquaint- 



30 Some Impressions of 

ances in the South-west discuss politics over their 
slings and cocktails, with knives and revolvers 
half hidden in their belts, so the London swell, 
as you meet him at the club or the party, hardly 
conceals under his waistcoat and watch-chains the 
handles of his weapons of defence ; and, set like 
jewels in the girdle that zones a lady's waist, 
you detect the dearest little gemmed and mounted 
implements of destruction. The Englishman con- 
ducts himself as though he were in an enemy's 
country. In the strictest apostolic sense he 
regards this life as a warfare. " And well he 
may," he would say. " Consider what people 
we meet, what dangers we encounter by sea and 
land, on the promenade, in the park, and at the 
watering-place. The parvenu walks abroad in 
daylight. All about us are people who don't 
know their grandfathers. Everywhere rich con- 
tractors and lotion-sellers lie in ambush. It 
behoves us to tread cautiously. And not only 
are we in constant dread of these people, but we 
must b© for ever on our guard against those of 
our own sort. If we are affable to our superiors, 
they may think us familiar ; if we are civil to 



J.] London Social Life, 31 

our equals, they may fancy we think them better 
than ourselves. So, amid imminent perils from 
the insults of the great, from the snubs of equals, 
and the familiarities of inferiors, we move through 
this dangerous wilderness of society." 

Of the external advantage of London society 
J have already spoken. Its machinery is nearly 
perfect. One meets numbers of persons who 
not only bear themselves perfectly, but seem to 
think and feel almost with perfection ; women 
sensible and gracious, men from whom reflection 
and high purpose have removed every trace of 
triviality. Parties and receptions have this ad- 
vantage ; we have the perfection of social ease 
with those to whom we are under no obligation 
to be agreeable. The guests cannot be uncon- 
scious and oblivious of the host, nor the host of 
the guests. But between those who meet on 
common ground there may be silence or con- 
versation, just as is most comfortable. Hence 
the benefit of such an organised social establish- 
ment as London possesses. The great distinction 
which rank and money obtain in England may 
perhaps be irksome to those who spend their lives 



32 London Social Life, [i 

in the midst of its society. To a stranger or 
sojourner, it is a novel and interesting feature. 
One felt that here was company which, however 
it might be in Saturn and Jupiter, no set of 
tellurians at least could affect to despise. You 
enjoyed this sensation. All round this wide 
planet, through the continents and the islands of 
the sea, among the Franks and the Arabs, the 
Scandinavians, the Patagonians, and the Poly- 
nesians, there were none who could give them- 
selves airs over this. The descendants of Adam, 
the world over, could show nothing better. 



1 



English Sitndays and London 
Chtirches. 



I DOUBT if there is, upon the outside, an ugher 
or more unattractive holiday in the world than 
Sunday in an English or American town. There 
is something in the spectacle of the closed shops 
and barred windows, the long, deserted business 
thoroughfare, and in the ringing of the iron cellar 
doors over which your feet rattle drearily, to the 
last degree desolate and inhospitable. Even in 
the parks and city squares the day does not lose 
its disconsolate aspect. The shoemaker and his 
wife trundling their baby carriage afflict us with 
a sense of commiseration. His Sunday clothes 
and his wife's parasol and their solemn, circum- 
spect walking about, suggest most vividly his 
unhappy, shabby toil, hi:-; unending drudgery. 

D 



34 English Sundays [ii. 

Can there be anything but ugliness in a city- 
square upon a Sunday, with an iron bench to sit 
upon, a gravel path to walk upon, a policeman 
near at hand, and the sight of three or four 
smart young clerks condemned to spend the day 
in each other's company. There is, however, in 
many American towns (I never saw anything of 
the kind in London), a street where the nice 
people walk up and down on Sunday afternoons. 
The young ladies are pretty and gay and loqua- 
cious, and the young gentlemen, though a trifle 
overdressed, are happy and endeavour to be 
agreeable. On a winter or autumn afternoon, 
the fine promenade of an American city is bright 
and splendid. There is something a little hard, 
something not quite warm and generous, in the 
spectacle of the long, cold, gay street. Yet the 
scene is not unpleasing. The polished window- 
pane is now and then lit up with a flickering ray 
of the firelight within. Certainly the day is not 
without austerity even here. But the neighbour- 
hood of friends in a great city finds one well 
contented with the severity and peculiarity of the 
religious festival of the week. I am willing to put 



II.] and London Churches. 35 

up with the abolition of the shop-windows, and the 
desolation of streets so bright on other days, with 
the depressing hilarities of the people, and the 
dismal bits of green grass, with fountains, iron 
benches, policemen, and baby-carriages. The 
tinge of gloom which hangs over the elegant 
quarter of the town is agreeable rather than 
otherwise. I am glad of the Puritan reminiscence 
which yet hangs about our Sunday. It is well 
that there should be one day in the week which 
we are under some vague obligation not to give 
to trivialities, when at times we shall even repress 
that laughter and joking at the sound of which 
dreams and emotions are apt to break away and 
vanish, when the lights are lov/ered and fingers 
wander over the keys, and "The spacious firma- 
ment on high," and " By cool Siloam^s shady rilV^ 
are sung by the voices of the kind and good. 

The English Sunday is more sombre than our 
own. Here the day wears more of a holiday 
aspect ; the people in the streets look happier 
and are better dressed. The genteel English 
think it common and snobbish to dress much on 
Sunday. Of course they ascribe this notion to 



36 English Sundays [11. 

their nicer sense of propriety ; but how much 
of it is due to superior taste and sanctity, and 
how much to the tradition that snobs dress on 
Sunday because persons of their station are com- 
pelled to work on other days, I do not pretend 
to decide. One may say that the English, as a 
rule, regard Sunday with rather more sobriety and 
strictness than ourselves. ' They think it is godless 
to stay away from church ; and it is to the 
churches one must go to see the English Sunday. 
We, in this country, have always had a poetic 
curiosity and interest in the churches and parson- 
ages of England. The "decent church" (inimitable 
adjective!) when, for the first time, on the road 
from Liverpool to London, one sees it crowning 
a well-clipped, humid hill-top, softly returns to the 
imagination as something known in infancy and 
forgotten. Ever since childhood our minds have 
been filled with innumerable stories and poems 
about the parsons and parsonages. There is the 
Vicar of Wakefield, and there is the clergyman 
in the " Deserted Village ; " and, later, we are 
familiar with many admirable or amusing parsons 
or parsons' wives and daughters on the pages of 



II. 1 and Loftdon CImrches. 37 

Miss Austin and Trollope. The clergyman seems 
to have been the best man in their society to unite 
in his person virtue and gentility with tragical 
poverty. On the other hand, there is in the 
lives of many clergymen's families just that 
pleiiimt of earthly comfort which is alluring for 
the gentler uses of literature, just that happy 
balance of circumstances which equally removes 
the household from the ugliness of want, and 
from the pretension which is the peril of too 
much success. The parson has been called the 
" centre of English society/' High and low, rich 
and poor, all group themselves about him, and 
compute their position by reference to him. He 
touches the community at every point ; he may 
know everybody, though his place is a very 
variable and accidental one. His importance, of 
course other things being equal, is in proportion 
to his income. He is a greater man in the country 
than in town. Some parsons are very much 
greater than others. Between a bishop and a 
poor curate there exists what the novelists would 
call a " gulf" Indeed, 1 am told that a young 
curate, when speaking to a bishop in the street, 



38 English Stmdays [11. 

v/ould be likely to take off his hat and stand 
bareheaded. In London, the priest appears to 
lose himself amidst the crowd ; but even there he 
retains an intrinsic identity and distinctiveness 
which nobody else possesses. 

We have, besides, been attracted by the artistic 
and poetical qualities of the Church of England. 
It possesses these attractions, not because it is a 
State Church, but because it is a National Church. 
It is the Church of all, and, because the people 
in humble and middle life outnumber the great 
and the fortunate, it is more the church of the poor 
than of the rich. This fact gives it substance and 
depth, and a sombre strength, like the chill sod 
and damp winds of their autumn evening. In the 
Church the people have for ages been christened, 
married, and buried ; indeed, any other kind of 
religious establishment has a look either shabby. 
or glaringly brand-new. With us it is always the 
particular church, say, at the corner of Moyomen- 
sing Avenue and i8th Street, which attracts or 
repels one. Is it a good place to go 1 Do we 
like the clergyman, and do we like the people } 
One of the best parts of any Church Service here, 



II.] and London Churches, 39 

I take it, is shakins^ hands with acquaints ;ices 
going down the aisk^.s. We go here to those 
houses which attract and please,' which are the 
brightest and happiest-looking. The minified 
cathedrals, where gloom was secured by the same 
cheap means by which one can get it in any 
pantry, namely, by having no windows, are re- 
placed by houses of worship more fit and sensible. 
We have no old churches ; and antiquity here is 
so weak and unimportant, that people do well 
in ceasing altogether to imitate its solemn and 
pathetic impressions. How slight and feeble is 
our past, the man will feel w^ho loiters in Trinity 
church-yard, or strolls for an hour in St. PauFs, 
the interior of which wonderfully resembles an 
old English church. What comes to us from pre- 
revolutionary times is scarcely more inspiring than 
the rubbish left in an attic by the people who 
move out to those who move in. Who that drops 
his ticket at Wall Street Ferry cares to remember 
that, on that spot, George and Martha Washington 
landed from Virginia ninety years ago ; or who of 
the crowds that flock hourly about the Exchange 
calls to mind that, on the balcony of a building 



40 English Sundays [ii. 

which once stood there, the first president was 
inaugurated ? The mighty To-Day of the con- 
tinent is scarcely conscious of these trifles. It 
is different in England. George III., with his 
tumultuous, triumphant Empire, and his thunder- 
ing Waterloos and Trafalgars, curbs the conceit 
and insolence of the living. So far as duration 
goes, America has had the very respectable past 
of nearly four centuries. But, whatever is ancient 
in point of time by association with this continent, 
seems to partake of its newness. What is old here 
does not at all become precious because it is rare. 
It is rather swallowed up in the all-pervading, 
all-forgetting present. A tomb-stone with 1790 
scratched upon it is a less impressive object here 
than in Europe. The occupant has no con- 
stituency ; there are too few of him to make it 
worth while to take him into account. But even 
the recent past in Europe is strong, because of 
the multitudes which disappear with a generation, 
and of the ages full of life and history upon which 
it lies. The names over the chancel of men who 
fell with Nelson, and the tablets upon the walls, 
not a half century old, appeal to us with a strange 
earnestness. 



II.] and London Churches, 41 

There is no doubt that these English temples 
possess sublime and fervid impressions which 
houses of worship of yesterday cannot produce. 
Yet the services in many of them, particularly 
in the West-End, are very dull and vapid. The 
churches were a third full, with pretty much every- 
body asleep or inattentive. The most devout and 
enthusiastic worship is to be found in those parts 
of London inhabited mainly by the lower middle 
classes — people who live by trades and small shops. 
In some churches, where the pews are reserved 
until the time for the service to begin, the outside 
public range themselves along the aisle, waiting 
to take the unoccupied seats when the moment 
comes. In other churches the pews are thrown 
open during the evening service, and anybody 
can come in and take a seat, the only precedence 
being such as long occupation and courtesy give. 
I remember a young lady who hustled me out 
of a comfortable corner on the plea that it was 
"hers.'' There she sat and opened her prayer- 
book and surrendered herself almost greedily to 
her ecstasy and meditation. How she valued 
that snug corner I could tell from the warlike 



42 Efigilsh Sundays [ii. 

expression of her countenance, when for a moment 
I looked sceptical of her right to eject me. 

This was at St. Dominic's, with the curate of 
which church I had the good fortune to contract 
an acquaintance. The curate of St. Dominic's 
was a very good, laborious, and capable man. He 
preached two or three sermons on Sunday ; his 
evenings were occupied with lectures and charities; 
during five -days of the week he taught a great 
city school. The rest of the time he took in 
writing his two sermons, visiting the sick and 
burying the dead, in reading the Bible to all the 
bed-ridden old women in the parish, and in bap- 
tising certain red and blue-faced, black-haired 
and very tender babies. How shall I describe 
him — a saint without a feebleness, a humorist 
without scepticism, an Englishman without a 
trace of the egotist, a tireless worker and an 
unquestioning child of duty ; yet with the most 
generous sense of enjoyment, and a most 
modest charity for the indolent and the semi- 
virtuous. I had a note to him from a friend 
who had met him in Switzerland. With his 
countenance I saw a good deal of St. Dominic's. 



II.] and London Churches, 43 

Often on Sunday evenings at 7 o'clock I used 
to call at the curate's lodgings for the chance of a 
walk with him to church, or rather a trot, for we 
were nearly always late, the parson stopping to 
tack a tail on to his sermon. It was a mile 
away, and the chimes of St. Dominic's were 
clanging as we brought up the vestibule. It was 
an ancient building, standing in what is called 
the " City," — a district inclosed by the old walls 
and now entirely taken up by trade. I got my 
seat in church, and when the bell stopped, the 
procession of choristers, dressed in white, began 
to move up the aisle, the youngest and tenderest 
coming first, the older and taller following. The 
little ones were often beautiful boys, with the 
soft tender English complexion, and looked like 
angels, though I often saw them nudging each 
other when they were responding the loudest, 
and communicating by dumb show, with spelling 
upon their fingers and with grimaces. Their faces 
were so clean, and they had their hair so well 
brushed, that it was easy to see that some neat 
and proud mother had inspected every one of 
them. One little fellow in particular looked as 



44 English Sundays \_\\. 

if his mother had followed him all about the room, 
holding him by the chin, brushing his forehead and 
temples violently as he retreated, and, perhaps, 
giving him now and then a crack on the head 
with the hair-brush. The procession grew coarser 
as it grew older ; the difference between the little 
and the big choristers was much like that between 
young and tender leeks and onions gone to seed. 
The choristers were, I suppose, taken almost en- 
tirely from the families of small shopkeepers and 
mechanics. Directly behind the grown choristers, 
and attired very much like them, came the clergy; 
and the contrast between their countenances 
showed more plainly than anything I remember 
seeing, the unmistakable unlikeness of gentle-, 
men to persons who are not gentlemen. There 
were the well-defined, educated faces of two or 
three young clergymen, and in a singular contrast 
was the loutish, indistinct chaos in the counte- 
nances of the overgrown singers. 

The curate preached always in the evenings, 
and led a good part of the service. His sermons 
were delivered in a low, musical monotone or 
recitative. They were thoughtful and well ex- 



II.] and London Churches. 45 

pressed, excellent sermons, among the best I heard 
in London ; but what made them especially admir- 
able was the manifest purity of the man, the 
reality of his goodness. Whether he read or 
preached, or prayed, or sat silent, you felt the 
influence of a devoted spirit. It is the sort of 
man he is, not so much what he says, that makes 
a clergyman a good one. You would not care 
to have a vulgar, superficial, or conceited person 
sit in your room and occupy your attention for 
an hour. It is just as unpleasant to have any 
such man moving constantly before your eyes in 
church, praying, reading, and exhorting. Of vul- 
garity one sees very little among the English 
clergy, but, of course, most clergymen, like most 
other people, do not possess very clear ideas, and 
it is necessary that they be exhibiting their lack of 
strength during the whole time they occupy the 
eyes of the congregation. Their manner of read- 
ing the Bible seems to be altogether without sense 
or reason. They take the promises, the revelations, 
the ecstasies, the lamentations, and the genealogies 
all in the same voice, and at the same pace. I 
remember once to have heard, in the afternoon 



46 English Sundays [11. 

service at Westminster Abbey, a clergyman reading 
the Scriptures in a heavy, sonorous voice, with 
which he was obviously very well contented. 
Paul, in the chapter read, has been speaking in 
a lofty. Apostolic strain, which the agreeable bari- 
tone suited very well. But he closes the epistle 
with some commonplace messages, which are 
manifestly not to be read with the same sub- 
limity of enunciation as the other parts of the 
chapter. But the clergyman grandly intoned, 
" Bring Zenas, the lawyer-r-r-r-r-r," and the ca- 
dences of this bathetic expression rolled among the 
arches of the cathedral and over the heads of the 
people. The curate of St. Dominic's intoned the 
service also, and with the motions of his voice 
his large congregation was instinctively in sym- 
pathy. His reading was affecting, as I have said, 
owing, not so much to any grace of manner, or 
agreeable vocal cadences (though his voice, was a 
sweet one), as to the purity and devotion of his 
spirit. Some more modern sorts of sin, I used 
to think, though, might have very well found 
their way into his liturgy. Could he not have 
elided " From false doctrine, heresy and schism," 



II.] and London Churches, 47 

and have intoned instead, " From inconstancy and 
vain obliviousness, from ennui, lassitude, and all 
self-admiration ! " 

St. Dominic's was one of the oldest of the city 
sanctuaries, its history stretching way back before 
Elizabeth. The church was destroyed and re- 
built at the time of the great fire. Its aisles have 
been the resting-place of city worthies as long as 
London has had Lord Mayors, or London women 
have been comely. Their quaint memorials were 
upon the windows — " Thomas Watson, citizen, of 
Milk Street, — 1513.^' How many generations of 
listless children, lying back in these pews during 
tne long service, have spelt out his virtues on the 
marble underneath, and wondered what a quaint 
old fellow he was, and how strange it must be 
to be dead so long, and have one's name scratched 
in such queer characters under the painted figures 
of saints and martyrs, then sighed to think what 
an age it would oe till dinner. St. Dominic's 
was just such a church as old City magnates 
should have worshipped and grown rich in. The 
place had a look of tarnished bullion and dingy 
guineas; it made one think of the dark corners 



48 English Sundays \\\,\ 

of old counting-rooms. On the walls and over 
the chancel, upward-gazing saints aspired withl 
the faith of long-gone ages. The glad singing' 
of the choristers and the murmurings of the 
people arose incessantly ; trom the tablets upon 
the walls the past gave testimony. There, with 
the dark wilderness of London trade without, thei 
people knelt and worshipped in the same old* 
place which had been a landmark to their be- 
lieving fathers. 

After church the curate used to guide me 
through all sorts of strange lanes and arcades, 
and openings, and narrow passages through which 
we could scarcely get abreast, to the vicarage, 
which was a third of a mile away, where half-a- 
dozen of the parsons of the neighbourhood 
gathered for supper. Incessant and indefatigable 
as he was. he yet seemed to have more time for 
his friends than many men who do not accom- 
plish a fourth of his work. I took advantage 
of all tne time I could get of him. He was 
always to be found after church on Sunday 
when the same group that gathered at the vicar- 
age came to him to lunch. These meetings were 



II.] a7id Londojt Churches. 49 

marked by a friendship and abandon rare, I 
should have supposed, among EngHshmen. This 
we owed to the hospitahty of the curate's spirit, 
and his laugh, which, I think, was one of the 
most delightful I ever heard. He possessed a 
most capacious nature. His humour, of which he 
had a great deal, was just like his frame, large 
and ruddy. He was from the farmer class ; and, 
it seemed to me, that he had in his blood the 
jollity of a hundred Christmas Eves, and in his 
voice the warmth and volume of centuries of 
roaring Yule-logs upon the hearth. He had 
perfect health ; he was three-and-thirty, indeed, 
but he had that other youth— the youth of purity 
and simplicity. On Sundays he usually came 
back from church in great spirits. His talk with 
his clerical friends ran upon parish matters, the 
peculiarities of some familiar people, an odd 
answer of a charity scholar to a question in the 
catechism, or what had been seen and heard 
among the poor during the week. For instance 
(this was told me in a subdued voice, as if to 
apologise for its profanity), the curate had called 
upon a poor girl who had lost her baby. He 



50 English Sundays [ii.- 

tried to comfort her, and told her that it wasi 
better off where it was. She was inconsolable ; ' 
but when he reminded her that it had gone to 
Heaven, she said " yes " (sobbing), that she be- 
lieved it was a "bloody little angel." I mention 
this to show the strength of the soil from which 
these men drew their nutriment. Their conver- 
sation was full of fact and personal experience ; 
but the wit and pleasure, the " sweet insanity " to 
which the company attained when their minds 
were the clearest and kindest, they owed to the 
patronage and hospitality of the host The free- 
dom and perfect unselfishness of the parson pro- 
voked the humour of his guests to the very limit 
of audacity ; indeed, at times, to the border of 
delirium. 

This pale photograph is all I have with which 
to reproduce his modesty, his efificiency, his good- 
ness, his friendship, his humour. Even these 
words — a hieroglyphical sort of suggestion of him 
rather than of definition — may bring him into 
trouble, should they find their way across the 
ocean. The ladies at the vicarage, where we used 
to sup on Sunday evenings after service, used to 



II.] and London Churches, 51 

tease him sorely. Indeed, that was the way they 
took to testify the warm regard in which they held 
the curate. They had rather a handle against him 
in the great devotion of certain old ladies in the 
parish. These old people could not help testifying 
their love of him, and not very skilful in expressing 
themselves, would make use of epithets rather 
more fond than accurate. Expressions meant for 
parsons of the honeyed or pallid and ascetic sort 
sat rather absurdly upon his broad shoulders. 
Then there were certain good and pretty women 
who used to persecute this devout man and worthy 
servant by recalling these compliments in his pre- 
sence. Thus he was never permitted to forget 
that he had been called ** the handsomest curate 
in Wolverton." Perhaps they may find something 
in my encomiums to tease him about. 1 can see 
him after church on Sunday evenings at the 
vicarage, indulging deep draughts of beer, and 
very busy at the cold chicken, amid gusts of his 
own laughter and expostulation, exclaiming that 
a certain iriend of his is a " blasted Yankee," " a 
i heretic," &c. 

People in England do not run together so much 



52 English Sundays [ii.| 

by churches as in this country. • There is the broad 

division between the Establishment and the Dis- 
senters, much broader than that between any two 
American denominations, though the Hne is by 
no means so marked as it once was. But you 
find comparatively very little association by par- 
ticular church societies. In the West-End there 
is none at all ; in the less fashionable parts of 
London the Church is a sort of focus for the con- 
gregation, but to no such degree as in America. 
They have nothing like our Sunday schools, about 
which the young people in an American town and 
village get together, and which, in their own minds, 
they associate much more intimately with cider 
and hickory nuts than with the catechism. Sun- 
day schools in England are entirely for the poor. 
The original object was to teach children who 
could not go to school during the week. Of the 
bright and attractive gatherings of pretty children 
and happy people among us they have no idea. 
The Sunday school here is so national and peculiar 
an institution, that I wonder it has not got into 
literature. The number of people, the country 
through, who have recollections of them, must be 



11.] and London Clm^xhcs. 53 

very great. In the days when school dIscipHne 
was severer than at present, a boy's reason for 
liking them was that they did not "lick" and 
" keep in.-*^ But the man who looks back upon 
those festivals will remember some impressions 
more exalted and mystical than any he has known 
since. There was a pale little girl, with a demeanour 
of almost severe purity, and a face quite grave 
and intense, who, on Sunday mornings, was hid 
from him too often by intervening and constantly 
interrupting heads and bonnets. The breeze that 
swung the branches into the open windows, rattled 
the Bible leaves, and blew a skein of her yellow 
hair over her temples. Then there was a boy of 
fifteen, who was the secretary, and who wore coat- 
tails, and who was a very great personage. With 
book in hand and pencil behind his ear, he went 
among the girls and gathered pennies, and re- 
ceived the offering of the pale little girl, apparently 
unconscious that she was unlike the others. This 
boy was marshal, and wore a rosette on excursions, 
and when a missionary came to address the school, 
he rose and moved a vote of thanks. Wild and 
thrilling eminence ! There was but one unpleasant 



54 English Sundays [n. 

thing about the Sunday school, that to-morrow 
was Monday, and that the sight of the pale little 
girl, and the pleasant hubbub about Jonah and 
Elijah, would be exchanged for the long, dark 
school-room, and the desks and the black-boards, 
and "What place was celebrated for its manu- 
factures?" and "What place for the intelligence 
of its inhabitants ?" the odious smell of slate and 
slate-pencil ; the master's ruler over the hands and 
his cane over the legs. 

But Sunday schools have of late years become 
much prettier places than they were fifteen or 
twenty years ago. At present they fit them up 
with fountains, nice furniture, and warm-coloured 
carpets, and the walls are decorated with mottoes 
and texts of Scripture in red, blue, and gilt. They 
sing sweetly and heartily, and the conversational 
hubbub of voices is bright and exhilarating. The 
confusion of tongues and subjects, when one sits, 
in the midst of it, is agreeable. A little boy near 
you spells out, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard." In 
the Bible class a young collegian of an investi- 
gating and somewhat sceptical turn is confounding 
the wisdom of his simple-minded teacher, who is 



II.] and London Churches. 55 

really in much awe of him, expostulates with his 
erudition and logical superiority, and warns him 
that too much learning has made him mad. Over 
the way the bears are devouring ' the boys who 
mocked Elisha ; while a fair little group of girls 
to your left are taking down the priests of Baal 
to a destruction which they and their teacher in 
a rather matter-of-course and apathetic manner 
appear to approve. Considering that so many 
human beings are cut to pieces, the look of mild 
and tacit acquiescence in the young teacher's 
countenance is rather dreadful, and it is some- 
what strange that the scholars should inspect 
each other's dresses, and exchange confidences, 
and that their faces should fall into absent and 
far-away expressions. 

They have none of these pretty things in Eng- 
land. I once attended a sort of Sunday school 
in the loft of a warehouse down by the river, 
where some bargees were taught. The young 
boatmen walked in in single file with an enor- 
mous clamping of boots, which must have been 
wooden, and an expression upon their counte- 
nances of an intention to behave with great 



56 English Sundays [n. 

decorum. They knelt dov/n much as you would 
suppose a row of Egyptian obelisks to do, and 
when down you wished that they would never 
attempt to get up again. One young man did 
continue kneeling some moments longer than was 
necessary. He arose with as much haste as pos- 
sible, and the whole of them, as a matter of course, 
immediately crammed their handkerchiefs down 
their throats (or whatever in a bargee^s wardrobe 
corresponds to a handkerchief), and by this panto- 
mime expressed their readiness to choke rather 
than violate propriety. I suppose that all British 
Sunday schools are modifications of this one. As 
the children who compose them are taken alto- 
gether from the very poorest, a look of squalor 
and dirt must be, I imagine, inseparable from 
them. 

St. Dominic's had no Sunday schools like ours, 
yet the young people of the church had some ex- 
ceedingly pleasant ways of spending time. For 
instance, they had dances during the Christmas 
holidays in the school-room of the church, to the 
great scandal of some of the neighbouring parishes. 
A small sum was charged for admission. The 



II.] and London Churches, 57 

room was prettily decorated with holly, evergreen, 
and ivy ; and all the young people of the church 
came and danced. Over this little realm, hid in 
the heart of London trade, the vicar's wife, a 
person of much sense and beauty, exercised a 
pleasant rule. Most of the young men had rather 
a half-baked look ; the best of them, it was easy to 
see, were not quite done. But my experience is 
that gentle and refined and lady-like women are 
of no class at all ; you find them everywhere. For 
centuries the beauty of London women has been 
famous. These young ladies, indeed, were not 
quite like the slight, pale slips, and faintly tinted 
blue-bells of the West-End. Bloom and zone 
they possessed in abundance. The faces of many 
of them were exceedingly comely. They had 
health, spirits, good-nature, and much freedom 
and humour. St. Dominic's was- very high, or 
very broad, or both, or neither, I forget which ; 
but, at any rate, it occupied just that theological 
attitude which a church may hold and give charity 
balls to the young people. At such times the 
school-room was too small, and they secured a 
hall in the neighbourhood. These assemblages, I 



58 English Sundays [11. 

think, attracted rather a higher class of people 
than the dances in the school-room. Thither 
came the most devout and charitable ladies of 
the parish. You may fancy how pleasant it was ; 
the church at Philippi gave me the right hand of 
fellowship. I was permitted to waltz with Priscilla, 
to gallop with Lydia, and to balances and turn not 
a few of the chief women in the lancers. 

St. Dominic's, it will be seen, practised a very 
agreeable type of Christianity. It must not be 
imagined, however, that this religion was in very 
general vogue. I heard a number of elderly 
people say that they never heard of such things 
in their lives as a dance in a church school-room. 
But a great many strange things have come to 
pass which elderly people never heard of. It 
really seems at present that everybody is tolerated 
except the Evangelicals. There are in England 
at present a great many kinds of people, and a 
great many kinds of belief They have -a strong, 
ably expressed, and respectable unbelief, like which 
we have nothing in America ; and lying oddly 
by the side of it is a good deal of what might 
be termed "religion as a matter of course."" Thus, 



II.] and London Churches. 59 

it is mentioned in the Blue Books that certain 
children in the agricultural regions cannot tell 
who made them ; yet this is not to be wondered 
at, when so many of the learned professors in the 
universities say they don't know. As a specimen 
of the diversity of opinion one meets with, a 
young lady once told me that she saw no reason 
to believe in the immortality of the soul ; and that 
women, she thought, were religious because they 
had nothing else to do. The next day a young 
curate assured me that on no account could he 
marry an Evangelical girl; though this austerity, 
I fancy, was a reminiscence of a severe youth 
which time and nature had mollified. (He pro- 
mised, by-the-way, that he would take me to call 
upon an "Evangelical girl," which he never did.) 
Between these extremes there is obviously room 
for some shades of opinion. Yet widely diverse 
as are the notions of men, all alike receive the 
heritage which the strong religious moods of early 
England have bequeathed them. They yet have 
the churches and the universities, St. Paul's, the 
Abbey, and Magdalen cloisters. There yet re- 
main abodes of solitude and emotion which no 



6o English Sundays [ii. \ 

modern hands can imitate, where men in mighty- 
cities can retire apart for an hour from the 
crowd, and dust, and turmoil. 

The night of my arrival in London I stopped 
at a hotel not far from Westminster. It was 
raining during the evening, and I did not go 
out, but sat before the grate in the smoking- 
room, strangely reflecting upon the strange, dark, 
new, old world about me. It was one of those 
large hotels to which people go who know 
nothing about London, and I had dined in a 
hushed and stately dining-hall instead of the 
dingy little coffee-room one should always seek. 
I was disappointed with the arid elegance of my 
surroundings, and began to fear that the world 
I was to enter upon the morrow might be as vain 
and modern. There was a young clergyman 
sitting near me, with whom I entered into talk. 
He was the rector of a parish somewhere in 
Shropshire, of which he told me the name, and 
it had an extremely pleasant country sound. 
(The reader will perhaps think me impressible, 
but why should I tell him of the stupid people 
I met i^) I had never met a man, it seemed to 



II.] and London Clmrches. 6i 

me, with a manner and spirit more refined, and 
when afterwards I had an opportunity to know 
him better, that impression was fixed and 
strengthened. His countenance and behaviour 
united gentleness and purity, softness and dignity. 
In the course of the conversation he spoke of 
the Abbey, and as he was modestly and kindly 
communicative, I got from him a good deal about 
it. He took a pencil and sketched me some 
hints of its architectural history ; • and he told 
me this story, which is perhaps familiar to many 
of my readers, but was new to me. Ages ago a 
clear stream watered the grassy margin of the 
river, where now the brown, viscid wave of the 
Thames laves its stone walls and embankments. 
Once at night a boatman saw upon the bank a 
man who beckoned him to come nearer. He 
rowed him across the stream to where the Abbey 
stood. The figure entered, and immediately the 
church was filled with light and music, and sing- 
ing angels. It was St. Peter who came to possess 
and consecrate his Cathedral. When my acquaint- 
ance retired he proposed that we should attend 
the ten o'clock sen^ices at the Abbey the next 



62 . Engiish Sundays " [ii 

morning. " They have every day," he said, " a 
morning and afternoon service. It is well to have 
some place in the heart of the city where one can 
be apart with one's God." The manner of the 
young clergyman was constrained and difiident ; 
I can convey no impression of the gentleness 
and purity with which these words were uttered. 
The next morning we went to the Abbey. I 
have never been since so distinctly conscious of 
the mood of- which it was the expression — if it be 
not presumption to talk of distinctness upon such 
a subject. I felt in the authors of that work a 
sense of that strong exclusion which possesses all 
artists in their clearest moments. Had the 
builders not had the sympathy of the multitude, 
these were emotions which, when brought in con- 
tact with an alien and astonished atmosphere, 
would have appeared how wild, how strange ! 
They could not have survived a day which did 
not comprehend them. But the aspiration and 
exultation had been changed to the stone of the 
solid globe. The thoughts of the builders may 
now fly hither and thither, the builders die and 
their visions with them, but still that dream en- 



II. J and London Churches. 6;J 

tranced remains ; the towers yet linger, the arches 
exult, the saints aspire; so I thought when first 
those aisles and ascending vaults were revealed to 
me, and when, with the pious few gathered under 
its canopy, I first heard the rejoicing of the 
choristers. 



Two Visits to Oxford. 



A NOTION, I believe, still prevails very generally 
that Oxford and Cambridge are the universities of 
the English aristocracy. It is to the novelists that 
we owe this impression. Years ago, these univer- 
sities were very much such places as Bulwer and 
Thackeray have painted them. But they have 
altered, and there has been nothing in their recent 
literature to mark the change. They still exist to 
a large portion of the public as elegant and 
aristocratic as ever. To the imagination of the 
English shop-girl, Oxford and Cambridge are yet 
peopled by a race of the most delightful heroes, 
who breakfast in velvet, who have valets and tigers 
and tandems, who ride and shoot and borrow each 
other's money, who are aristocratically lavish and 
aristocratically hard up. 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford. 65 

Now, on the contrary, the real Oxford does not 
resemble this conception in the least, and at first 
sight, perhaps, the social life of the place is even 
plainer and more commonplace than we should 
observe it to be on closer acquaintance. One has 
scarcely stepped into the streets before he meets 
numbers of well-behaved, modest youth, walking 
by twos and threes, not in droves, as students 
patrol the streets of an American university town. 
There cannot be found in Europe, I imagine, a 
more well-conducted, orderly generation of young 
men. The most of them are from the middle 
classes and are upon limited incomes. The average 
allowance of an Oxford undergraduate as not more 
than 1,200 dollars, upon which, of course, magnifi- 
cence is out of the question. The number of 
clergymen's sons is very great, and these, as a 
rule, are poor. 

It is thought that a man can live nicely and 
entertain moderately on 1,500 dollars. The under- 
. graduates have a dinner "in Hall" of fish, roast, 
and sweet, and at dinner they usually drink beer 
instead of wine. They have opportunities for 
luxury and elegance in their breakfasts, which 



66 Two Visits to Oxford. [m. 

they make very inviting. They brew at Oxford 
a claret cup with which nothing of the same kind 
one tastes anywhere else can be compared. The 
young men are exceedingly kind and hospitable, 
and they possess a modesty which absolutely 
humiliates one. 

An English youth, as I saw him in the army 
or at the universities, who is sufficiently well born 
to have all the advantages of breeding, and suffi- 
ciently removed from exceptional fortune not to 
be tempted to folly and nonsense, has the very 
perfection of behaviour. He has, besides, very 
nearly the perfection of right feeling towards his 
associates, which cannot be said of him a few 
years later. I knew some of the undergraduates 
of Christ Church and Baliol. Under their 
guidance I went the walks of the universities, 
and especially remember a bath in the river, to 
which I consented under the impression that it 
would be rather an interesting and romantic 
action, and would furnish a pretty souvenir, but 
I found the wave of the Isis much too cold for 
comfort. Christ Church is rather a college for 
the sons of rich men ; it is not considered, I 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford, 6j 

believe, that they do much work there. Bah'ol is 
one of the working colleges — those which take the 
honours. The talk of the Baliol men, I thought, 
ran rather more to books and literature than the 
conversation at Christ Church. This was possibly 
due to the fact that a Christ Church man was to 
give a ball that week, which was naturally the 
topmost matter of interest among the men of his 
college. At Baliol, when the pewter cup of beer 
went round, of which each took a cool swig in 
succession, we spoke of matters which are rarely 
discussed with interest except at universities and 
by very young men. We talked of the poets, and 
I remember one young gentleman's enthusiasm 
swept him into reciting a half dozen lines of 
Greek. 

The pride in scholarship, and the respect for it, 
I am told, are very much on the decline. Firsts 
and double-firsts are not held in such esteem as 
formerly. One hears it said that the boating and 
cricket men have thrown the reading men into 
the shade. A good cricketer is asked everywhere, 
and talked and written about, and pushed in 
society. Years ago many good stories were told 



68 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

of the extravagant regard which successful prize- 
men received from the universities. It was said that 
a senior wrangler from Cambridge happened to 
enter a theatre in London at the same time with 
the Queen, and, hearing the plaudits, placed his 
hand gracefully over his heart, and bowed his 
acknowledgments to the audience. The old 
fashion, no doubt, had its absurdities, as all 
fashions have ; but, upon the whole, it was more 
reasonable than the present one. We are mis- 
taken if we fancy that it is mere " dig " and 
memory which makes the successful man in a 
university examination. It requires not only 
persistence, but ability, intelligence, and self-pos- 
session. Of course where many work, the victory 
must be to him who works most intelligently. 
The scholar and the boating man must equally 
guard against over-training ; and at the hour of 
examination the danger of losing one's head is 
very much greater than in a boat-race. The stake 
is so great that the strain of the contest seems a 
cruel one for very young men to undergo. If they 
win, they have a competency for the rest of their 
days — a thing to be appreciated in England, where 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford, 69 

a living is so very hard to make. All the mothers 
and cousins are waiting breathlessly for the issue. 
Such competition must, I fancy, impart an almost 
abnormal stimulus to the moral qualities. In the 
faces of the stronger men one observes some 
" silent rages," which the intensity of the struggle 
has nursed. Why such men should have less con- 
sideration than a cricketer or a stroke-oar one can 
hardly see. A strong back and good legs are fine 
gifts, no doubt ; but it is hard to understand why 
their possessor should be so petted and feted, 
should have his picture in the illustrated papers, 
and have his disorders telegraphed over two con- 
tinents. The vignettes in the papers appear 
especially absurd. Why should boating men 
have pictures made of their faces ? They should, 
it would seem, stand on their heads and have their, 
legs taken. 

It was during Commemoration week that I first 
visited Oxford. The exercises consist of the con- 
ferring of degrees upon distinguished persons, and 
the recital of prize poems in Greek, Latin, and 
English ; and I may incidentally remark, that at no 
ball or party in England do you ever see so many 



70 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

pretty girls as at a university commemoration. 
The same is true, however, of college celebrations 
everywhere ; girls have a way of looking their 
prettiest at them. The degree conferred upon 
strangers at Oxford is that of Doctor of Civil 
Law. It is not supposed that a man should know 
anything of law to be a D.C.L. Critics, poets, 
politicians, hiventors, noblemen, for being noble- 
men, are doctored. The first commemoration I 
saw was at the installation of Lord Salisbury. 
The candidates were marshalled up the hall from 
the door in single file, all dressed in red gowns. 
The Professor of Civil Law, Mr. Bryce, introduced 
each in a Latin speech, which contained some 
happy characterisation. The Chancellor then ad- 
dressed the candidate in another Latin speech, 
applying to him some complimentary expressions ; 
the bar was raised, and he shook the candidate by 
the hand, who sat down a D.C.L. Of course, as 
always happens in England, there was a throng of 
people of rank who went ahead of abler men. 
The cheering of the undergraduates, however, went 
some distance towards equalising things. The men 
who received the warmest applause were Liddon, 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford, 71 

the famous preacher, and Arnold, the poet. When it 
came to the latter gentleman's turn, all young Ox- 
ford in the galleries went wild. They made a pro- 
digious cheering ; the young men's enthusiasm was 
enough to stir some generous blood in the most 
sluggish veins. Of course, Mr. Arnold's compara- 
tive youthfulness had much to do with it, and his 
recent attacks upon the Dissenters had endeared 
him to the clergymen's sons in the galleries. The 
Chancellor, who had been throwing about his issimes 
profusely among people of whom I at least had never 
heard, contented himself with calling Mr. Arnold, 
vir ornatissime, or some other opprobrious epithet — 
which, as one of Mr. Arnold's many admirers, I 
felt called upon to resent. I understood after- 
wards, however, that Lord Salisbury had con- 
jidered the propriety of addressing him as O 
htcidissime et dulcissime (most light and most 
sweet), which, I suppose, would scarcely have 
done. He did joke, though, in one case ; he ad- 
dressed the editor of the " Edinburgh Review " as 
vir doctissime, in republica litterarum potentissime, 
and at that everybody was amused. The incident 
gives one a high idea of the power which inheres 



72 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

in reserve, dignity, and position. A cabinet minister, 
by congratulating an editor upon his formidable- 
ness in the republic of letters, creates more merri- 
ment than could a harlequin by throwing his body 
into twenty contortions. 

The bad behaviour of the undergraduates in 
the gallery on these occasions is famous. I was 
present at two commemorations, and can testify 
to the power of lung and the great good humour 
and animal spirits of the British youth. At the 
last commemoration they kept up an incessant 
howl from the beginning to the end. I cannot 
say much for the wit, though, I believe, they do 
sometimes hit upon something worth recording. 
When Longfellow was made D.C.L. an under- 
graduate proposed, " Three cheers for the red man 
of the West,^^ which, I am told, Mr. Longfellow 
thought very good. But, of course, wit and 
originality are just as rare among yelling boys 
as in synods and parliaments. The scant wit is 
supplemented by the more widely diffused qualities 
of impudence and vocal volume. When the Vice- 
Chancellor, Dr. Liddell, of Liddell and Scott's 
Dictionary (the accent of his name, by-the-way, 



III.] Two Visits to Oxfoi'd, 73 

is not upon the last syllable), was reading a Latin 
address, some one would call out, " Now construe." 
A man who violated the canons of dress by ap- 
pearing in a white coat was fairly stormed out 
of the place. He stood it for an hour or so, 
during which he was addressed : " Take off that 
coat, sir." "Go out, sir." *' Woiit you go at 
once V " Ladies, request him to leave." " Doctor 
Brown, v/on't j^?/ put that man out .?" (Then, in a 
conversational and moderate tone), " Just put your 
hand upon his shoulder and lead him out." After 
an hour of it, the man withdrew. Each successive 
group of ladies was cheered as it came in. The 
young men would exclaim : " Three cheers for the 
ladies in blue." " Three cheers for the ladies in 
white, brown, red, grey," &c. The poor fellows 
who read the prize odes and essays were dreadfully 
bullied. One young man recited an English poem, 
of which I could not catch the burden, but from 
the manner of its delivery I should say that it 
must have been upon the saddest subject that ever 
engaged the muse of mortal. His physiognomy 
and his tone of voice alike expressed the dismal 
and the disconsolate. I think that possibly the 



74 Two Visits to Oxford. [m. 

extreme sadness of his manner may have been 
induced by the reception rather than the matter 
of his poem. They cat-called, hooted him, and 
laughed immeasurably at him. One young gentle- 
man with an eye-glass leaned over the gallery, and 
in a colloquial tone inquired, " My friend, is that 
the refrain that hastened the decease of the old 
cow } " In the intervals of the horrible hootings, 
I could only now and then catch a word like 
" breeze " or " trees." By-and-by the galleries 
caught the swing of the poet's measure, and kept 
time to his cadences with their feet, and with a 
rhythmical roar of their voices. It was too painful 
to laugh at. One felt so for the poor fellow, and 
more still for his mother and sisters, who, I am 
sure, were there. I was particularly glad to notice 
among the men who last year were compelled to 
face the music, a man who the year before had 
been especially energetic in the galleries. 

To see an English university, one should look 
at it from the don's side rather than the under- 
graduates*. Undergraduates are of exceedingly 
little importance. The dons are the essentials of 
university life ; the students are its transient and 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford. 75 

unimportant incidents. At Yale, when we were 
juniors, we thought ourselves of consequence. We 
considered a senior greater than a professor, and 
the tutors we pretended to hold in no esteem at 
all. The purpose of the founders of the University 
of Oxford, as one dispirited and conservative old 
gentleman told me, was originally not study alone, 
but study and devotion. The colleges were asso- 
ciations of men who gave their lives to learning 
and religion. The education of youth was rather 
an afterthought and an incident. Whether or not 
the present state of things at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge is the result of tradition, it is certainly true 
that the fellows and masters of the colleges con- 
stitute the universities. At Cambridge I had 
letters to two of the Fellows of Trinity ; and at 
Oxford I was the guest for a week of a friend 
who was a fellow of Oriel. The spirit and social 
atmosphere of the two universities seemed to me 
very much the same ; almost any statement which 
might be true of the society of either would be 
true of the other. 

A Fellow, as everybody knows, passes a good 
examination, and for the rest of his life, or until 



76 Two Visits to Oxford, [iil 

marriage, draws from the university an income 
of from 1,000 to 1,500 dollars. For this he is 
under no obligation to return any labour. Those 
who reside at the universities are usually tutors 
or lecturerSj and for these services of course 
receive extra pay. On marriage they are com- 
pelled to resign their fellowships. The men who 
wish to marry, obtain, if they can, livings in the 
Church, school-inspectorships, or appointments 
under government. Recently the universities 
have been pressing the abolition of the restriction 
upon marriage, and "expecting it from every suc- 
cessive parliament. It is both pleasant and pain- 
ful to think of the number of interesting young 
couples who at this moment are waiting for a 
word from the British Government. A very 
pretty tale one might make of it. The story of 
another Evangeline, waiting through long years 
upon the slow steps of legislation, and rising each 
morning to scan with eager eyes the parliamentary 
proceedings, might form a good subject for a 
play or a poem. I examined very few of the 
considerations in favour of the reform. This one 
presents itself, however — men are always strangely 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford. 77 

tempted to what is forbidden them ; cehbacy 
may not be so irksome, if they know they may 
marry when they choose. Upon the other side I 
heard a bachelor urge that the university would 
cease to be such an equal, reasonable, sensible 
place as it has been heretofore. The women 
would introduce discord. The wife of a Head 
would no doubt think herself above a poor tutor's, 
and would give herself airs. 

Were it not for the peculiar and easily ex- 
plained susceptibility of college tutors, the cir- 
cumstances of their bachelor life are so delightful 
that one might wonder that even matrimony can 
tempt them away from it. The physical life is 
looked after very well. The dinners are fair and 
the lodgings comfortable. The bachelor can do 
there what is difficult to do elsewhere : he can 
live well and dine in pleasant company. He is 
not solitary as at a club, and the company of 
congenial men who have the same interests with 
himself makes the commons' dinner infinitely 
better than any table dliote. The dons' rooms 
are of all degrees of comfort and elegance. Some 
of them are very bare ; others are pretty and 



78 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

well furnished. The rooms of men who have 
been some time at the university, and who have 
a taste for elegance, grow to be pretty; and a 
pleasantly-arranged room, I believe, must always 
be the result of time. At Merton College, Oxford, 
I saw an apartment of which the whble front 
had been made into a bow-window, facing upon 
a green and humid quadrangle. Its occupant, I 
remember, showed me, among his curiosities, a 
side-board of the 17th century, on which was 
carved in very bold relief a good part of the 
events of Genesis. There was a figure of the 
Lord, about as long as your finger, walking in 
the garden ; and Adam and Eve and the Serpent 
were engaged in conversation about the Tree of 
the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam, strange 
to say, was accompanied by a dog of some choice 
breed, which smelt about his heels in a rather 
clumsy wooden manner, but very much as fallen 
canine nature is yet in the habit of doing. Such 
elegance and curiousness are unusual, I suppose, 
though many of the rooms are cozy and inviting. 
The ceilings are low, and low ceilings are warm 
and pleasant. One is delighted with the sense 



III.] Tzuo Visits to Oxford, 79 

of the ancient atmosphere, the ample grate, the 
books upon the shelves and strewn about the 
tables. 

At Cambridge I left my cards and letters, and 

in walking about the town missed seeing J , 

of Trinity, who had called in my absence, but I 
chanced to meet the dean of one of the smaller 
colleges, whom I had known in London, and I 
accepted his invitation to his college. I went 
with him the pretty walk behind the colleges, 
and, reaching his room, found there several of the 
tutors who had strolled in, and were sitting in the 
dusk before the grate, waiting for dinner. The 
dining-hall of the college was small and dimly 
lighted. There were but three or four of the 
Fellows present, and we sat together upon a raised 
platform. An undergraduate read a long grace 
in Latin. I sat with my back to the wall, so that 
I could look over the Fellows down upon the 
tables, dim and candle-lit, where the young men 
dined. The fewness of the undergraduates, and 
the quiet and dark of the hall gave one a 
feeling something like that which children have 
when huddled under a big umbrella. Sitting in 



8o Two Visits to Oxford. [ni. 

talk with these intelligent, unaffected scholars, 
and having one's heart warmed by their genial 
converse and kind attention, and with one's only- 
distraction to peep into the dim and quiet ends 
of the room, how blessed seemed these men's oc- 
cupations, how pleasant the tenor of their lives ; 
how attractive appeared the comfort, the poetry, 
and solid happiness there is in learning ! The 
hall at Trinity is, I believe, the great place to 
see. " If they ask you to dine there, mind you 
go," I was told. But who does not know the 
pleasure of finding beauties and curiosities of 
which the almanacs say notliing ! I liked to 
think that the earth contained so happy a spot 

as this dim hall of College, unpraised of 

men and unheralded by the guide-books. I was 
more diverted with the old side-board at Merton 
than with the Tower of London. 

The next morning the Dean and myself accepted 
an invitation to breakfast from J ^^ , of Trinity. 
We climbed up one of those dark, narrow, per- 
pendicular winding staircases, and knocked upon 
his door, and our host came out to meet us. He 
introduced me to -two or three others whom he 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford. 8i 

had invited. It was raining, I remember, and the 
windows of his room looked down upon a drip- 
ping garden (garden is the name given to a lawn 
planted with trees), and a little arched bridge 
which crossed a stream like a mill-race. The 
drops fell rapidly against the window-panes, and 
it was dark and warm in the large, low, old room 
where we breakfasted. My host's conversation 
was light and witty, and the talk of the table 
ran much to politics, and that pleasantest and 
most instructive kind of discourse, gossip. A 
good deal was said of education, which is one 
of the most pressing political questions for Great 
Britain. One gentleman, who was a school- 
inspector, had been driving about England, look- 
ing at the private schools everywhere along his 
route, and examining the teachers and scholars. 
With the exception of the examination, it struck 
me that this must be a very pleasant occupation. 
There were present at this breakfast several 
men who, I was told, were very clever ; and 
again, as elsewhere in Cambridge and Oxford, 
was I struck with a quality of theirs, which if I 
praise they may laugh at me — I mean their 

G 



82 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

modesty. Some of them were even diffident It 
was a pleasure to look at these men, and think, 
" You know ever so much about international law, 
and you about the Greek philosophy, and nobody 
knows what you can tell us about the particles." 
My host was a lecturer upon Plato, I believe. 
We sat together for an hour after breakfast, and 
I fell to admiring audibly his circumstances and 
employments. Our conversation was upon topics 
not usually touched upon by men on the first 
day of an acquaintance. One of the drawbacks 
of travel is that natural delicacy which forbids 
men who are strangers from speaking upon any 
but trivial subjects. The necessity is sometimes 
rather hard upon travellers, who are always 
strangers. But I remember the Trinity lecturer 
making such a remark as this — that no course 
of philosophical reading ever gave satisfactory 
opinions to anybody. Still, it is very well to 
have tested for oneself the vanity of such a way 
of getting at the truth. But it is not to be ex- 
pected that they would appreciate their advan- 
tages ; scarcely anybody does. My host walked 
with me about the colleges, and promised, if I 



III.] Two Visits to Oxford. 83 

stayed, that I should see an old gentleman who 
had been Lord Byron's tutor when that young 
nobleman was an undergraduate at Trinity. 

At Oxford I was for a week the guest of a 
friend who was a Fellow of Oriel. An Oriel 
Fellowship has always been, I am told, the under- 
graduate's blue-ribbon ; and I presume that the 
men I met there were very excellent specimens 
of Oxford. The undergraduates had left the uni- 
versity, and the Fellows of Oriel dined, not in hall, 
but in the wine-room. A curious feature of the 
meal, the grace, has been, I believe, incorrectly 
given by visitors. Before dinner they say " Bene- 
dict us beiiedicatl' and after dinner — i.e., just before 
dessert — somebody drops his head in the middle 
of the talk and says, ^^ Be^iedicto benedicaturr The 
room is hung round with pictures of the ancient 
and recent worthies of the college. A fine and 
large likeness of Clough looked down upon the 
warm and pleasant scene. This sort of living, 
compared with the only bachelor modes of exist- 
ence I had ever known — a club, a boarding- 
house, or a hotel — seemed perfection. And if the 
old wainscoted room and the company of the 



84 Two Visits to Oxford, [m. 

genial scholars was so pleasing, what did I think 
one evening when, dining at Merton College, famed 
for the beauty of its gardens, coffee was served in 
a rustic seat on the lawn, and, as the summer 
evening came down upon the grass and the still 
trees, and a star or two came out and brightened, 
and the towers over us and about us grew grayer 
and darker, we sat and talked, and listened far 
into the twihght ? 

In a week's stay about Oxford I saw it in many 
forms and moods. An Oxford quadrangle is the 
hoariest and most ancient spectacle in my ex- 
perience. Shut up in one of them at the time 
of sun-down the impression is particularly strong. 
One feels the planet to have aged. I found it 
difficult to conceive that a scene yet strong with 
the strength of Nature remained anywhere i,i the 
world. It was hard to think that beyond the 
swelling and sinking Atlantic the blue line of 
the Alleghany trembled over the quiet harvests of 
a familiar valley, or that the stream of the yellow 
Missouri drowned with disconsolate floods his 
black slimy islands of sand. 

Some of the quadrangles were very gray and 



III. 



Two Visits to Oxford. 8 



sombre : others were warm and happy. In the 
cloisters of Magdalen they have found tne flower 
which best harmonises with the associations of the 
place. It is the wild rose. Upon a mid-summer 
afternoon, when Oxford is deserted — when no feet 
but your own are heard in the cloisters — when the 
blue air of the quadrangle is warmed to the fill by 
the sun— there is that in the odour of the flower of 
wild, yet sweet, of gay, yet yearning, which harmo- 
nises well with the spongy turf, with the moist air 
thrilled by the sunshine, with the cold recesses of 
the cloister and the benign silence with which the 
scene regards your footfall. 

The character for learning of the men I met at 
the universities stands, I suppose, as high as that of 
the same class of men anywhere in the world. It 
is a pleasure to me to dwell upon their candour 
and kindness. I discovered scarcely anything to 
find fault with. "We grow a very disagreeable 
specimen of prig here," said one. I did not see 
him. Here and there I met a man whose playful- 
ness had a somewhat learned flavour and whose 
speeches might, when repeated, have had a sound 
of pedantry, but the awkwardness was accompanied 



86 Two Visits to Oxford. [m. 

by a simplicity which made it rather attractive. I 
must say, though, that the wit was a Httle wordy — 
but that is true of the wit of young college tutors 
everywhere ; their jokes may be said to have ex- 
tension, their jests and quips remind one of the 
gambols of a Newfoundland pup. The older men, 
where they were not more solemn, had rather more 
pith and point. But the wit of scholars is apt to 
be diluted, just as is that of the man of fashion, 
though from a different cause. The wit of the 
man of "fashion shares the general feebleness of his 
nature ; that of the scholar is poor because he does 
not see enough of life ; because the situations in 
which he is an actor or a looker-on are not suffi- 
ciently numerous, various, and rapidly successive. 

What especially strikes the visitor at the uni- 
versities is their way of speaking the unadulterated 
truth ; it does not occur to them that anything 
else should be spoken. They have their pretenders 
and humbugs in England just as here — men who 
live and thrive .by \\\^ inevitable folly and inatten- 
tion of the mass of the community. Some poor 
offspring of a lucky talent and a lucky opportunity 
wins applause and place and profit with scarcely a 



III.] Tzuo Visits to Oxford. 87 

strug-gle. Some lig-ht creature gets the start of 
this tremendous world, and is swept onward Hke a 
leaf. Oxford and Cambridge are the places to 
hear these men called by their right names. It is 
just as well that most people do not indulge in 
such plain speaking, for most people would be apt 
to be mistaken. Bat at the universities there are 
many thinking, educated men, whose opinions 
are tolerably apt to be correct. They are very 
little troubled with that charity which will say no 
ill of your neighbour because the report of it may 
come to vour neighbour's ear. They have no axes 
to grind, no ulterior aims, no policies. One evening 
at Oxford a well-known name was mentioned, and 
the whole company at once agreed that he was an 
ass. That was my own opinion ; but had I men- 
tioned it am.ong people more polite and circum- 
spect, I should have been thought, if not a jealous 
and deprecatory person, at least a very rash one 
— perhaps one of those envious detractors who 
go about tearing the reputations of the great and 
good. The man was certainly dull and talkative, 
yet he deserved respect of a kind. There was an 
acerbity, however, in the comment which his folly 



88 Two Visits to Oxford. [in. 

did not quite explain. Why should they so go out 
of the way to abuse a comparatively unimportant 
man for merely being an ass ? This point was 
naively met by one ingenuous young accuser, who 
said, " After all, the only thing I have against him 
is that he's a successful man." 

English writers upon this country have given us 
the impression that their scholars are less men of 
the world than our own. I found tne young men 
at Oxford and Cambridge very greatly interested 
in matters outside their universities. Many of 
them, I thought, were piqued by the social power 
which the aristocracy still retains in England, for 
no men are better placed than themselves to see 
how belated is the entire face of their society. 
Not a few of them have aspirations for political 
careers. Many are barristers and have chambers 
in London, some few conducting cases, but many 
more waiting for them. For those who are only 
students and citizens of the world, the greatest 
city in Europe is but two hours away. It is they 
who get most out of university life. They may 
infest, if they choose, those old quadrangles of 
Oxford for a lifetime ; the ends of Europe are 



111.] Two Visits to Oxford 89 

within two days ol their The physical man and 
the eating;, drir^ling, and sleeping man are well 
enough cared for. They have the great libraries, 
and the constant society ot" cultivated men in such 
numbers that they may look about among them- 
selves for suitable acquaintance. They have for a 
home one of the most beautiful places in the 
world. There is scarcely a happy circumstance of 
a scholar's life which fortune and the generous 
wisdom of the men who have been through 
centuries the custodians of their university have 
denied them. 



The British Upper Class in 
Fiction, 



*' Not you, but the house derides me/' said the 
wolf to the kid in the fable. This is the answer 
which society makes to any insolent or arrogant 
individual who happens to be out of its reach. 
P'ortunate men everywhere are apt to fall into 
the kid's mistake ; and of all swells, none cherishes 
the delusion so honestly as an Englishman. 
He stands there protected in that insouciance 
which the novelists admire, and which he himself 
deems the consummate result of history and 
human progress, by defences which are none of 
his making. The radical claim, the fundamental 
distinction of an Englishman of the upper class 
is, that no man can get the better of him in 
hauteur. The neighbourhood of the most op- 



IV.] The British Upper Class in Fiction. 91 

presslve or confusing personality will run off him 
like water. He will flush as he passes no man ; 
no man can give him two fingers. Should by 
any chance his bosom acknowledge impression or 
trepidation, his exterior shall be calm as stone. 
And he is proud to think that this gift of his is 
not the accident of his station or his circum- 
stances, but is an inherent virtue of his own, of 
which adverse fortune cannot rob him. He may 
be deprived of health, money, and friends ; he 
may be baffled and beaten here, and lost here- 
after ; but it is his belief and consolation that 
the time can never come when he may be snubbed. 

To this it may be said, that the courage which 
confronts a future or a possible evil is a very 
easy one. Difficulty, until we meet it face to 
face, is an unknown quantity. It is x; when 
really upon us, it becomes a -\- h. He who is in 
the midst of the difficulty he challenged from a 
distance, may with perfect consistency retire, 
claiming that when he made the engagement, he 
had not sufficient data to go upon. He agreed 
to encounter x^ not a -\- b. 

Undoubtedly the qualities which constitute the 



92 The British Upper Class [iv. 

distinction in the swell are precisely not the 
qualities which constitute success in the great 
struggle of man for subsistence. The " survivors '' 
of Mr. Herbert Spencer have succeeded by alert 
attention, rather than by an elegant inattention. 
The monkey that saw the apple first got it ; the 
chimpanzee that first saw the wild cat was the 
first to get away from him. In the " incoherent " 
ages, when one man met in the forest another 
who was carrying a sword or a spear, he did not 
saunter by, relying upon his own unconscious 
majesty, and the impressibility of his adversary, 
as a protection against a blow in the back of the 
head. He was the best man who had the most 
and the quickest perceptions, rather than he who 
had the fewest and the slowest. 

But whatever may have been true of those 
rem.ote and uncertain ages, in society, as we 
know it, the alert, attentive man plainly gets 
ahead of the inattentive one. A certain suavity 
and deference in his dealings with others will 
not hurt him. He cannot ignore the man out 
of whom he makes money. -He cannot snub a 
client, a customer, or a patient with impunity. 



IV.] in Fictio7i. 9^ 

The swell, therefore, whom adverse fortune com- 
pels to take his chances with other men. has 
either to fail, or to relinquish his superb be- 
haviour, and to change his principle of elegant 
unconsciousness into one of alert attention. He 
may say that he will die first, which would per- 
haps be the more heroic and graceful exit from 
the difficulty, providing he died at once. But 
he thus registers himself among the defeated and 
fails — the very thing it was the boast of his 
ancestors that they did not do. Should he 
happen to have hostages to fortune, in the shape 
of wife and children, the complexion of his case 
would be entirely altered. To take defeat for 
himself would be his right ; to accept it for 
those dependent upon him would be quite another 
thing. It is pretty plain, then, that the swell is 
very much in the position of the kid upon the 
house-top. If he were a lawyer's clerk, of course 
these fine ways would have to cease. If he were 
on the staff of a popular weekly, and had to 
dance in the liveliest paragraphs under the whip 
of the managing editor, or the proprietors, or 
the public, he would find his unconsciousness 



94 The British Upper CLiss [iv. 

and haiitciLr very inconvenient He would, no 
doubt, consider the editor a demagogue, an in- 
accurate, semi-honest, and wholly uneducated 
person ; would gnash his teeth in secret over the 
failure of the proprietors duly to appreciate their 
own vulgarity, and would heartily despise the 
silly public; but when this inadequate revenge 
had been taken, there would be nothing left for 
him to do. 

It was very easy to see that, as a matter of 
fact, the young Englishman of the class of which 
I am speaking did change his manners as soon 
as his circumstances changed. Men of precisely 
the same claims of birth had a very different 
behaviour. Those who had to make their way 
acquired a more eager, and, as a rule, a more 
complaisant manner than their luckier cousins. 
Even diplomatists and private secretaries to heads 
of departments were evidently alive to, and 
anxious to conciliate the good opinions of others. 
At the clubs it was not difficult to pick out, 
from their more alert behaviour, the men whose 
fortunes were capable of improvement, and who 
were on the look-out to better them. In a word, 



IV.] in Fiction. 95 

when i}> Eiif^land, I saw that a swell, so soon as 
he perceives that his distinctions do not pay, 
relinquishes them. 

It will be seen that these distinctions appeal 
for admiration to persons in a certain middle 
condition of education. Those who appreciate 
such graces to the full must be somewhat civilised 
and yet somewhat immature. A degree of im- 
pressibility in the men who look on is the 
condition of the exercise of -the swell's talent. 
What sort of impression would insouciance make 
upon a hungry tiger .? Nor would it impress an 
educated and acute man who insists upon sub- 
mitting reverie to the test of definition and cri- 
ticism. It is to the shop-boy, and the writer 
for the spring annual, that such graces appeal. 

The aristocracy has received, from time to 
time, very various treatment at the hands of 
literature. The writers of the age of Queen 
Anne — a keen and critical race — never gave them 
any very respectful consideration. Later in the 
century the novelists dealt with them in a very 
truthful and sensible fashion. Fielding, I re- 
member, somewhere takes occasion to explain in 



96 The British Upper Class [iv. 

a foot-note that by the " mob " he does not 
mean the common people, but the coarse and 
the ignoble in every rank. In those days the 
aristocracy possessed real pov/er. When their 
power had come to an end, and they retained 
only their social precedence, the admiration of 
their class superiorities seems to have begun. 
It is a somewhat curious fact that Bulwer, Dis- 
raeli, the Kingsleys, and other writers of the last 
quarter of a century, have expressed an admira- 
tion for the upper classes which is new in 
English literature. Nothing of the kind is to 
be found in their great predecessors, Scott, Miss 
Austen, and Miss Edgeworth. The reason is, I 
suppose, that blessings brighten as they take 
their flight. The strong, whether they be good 
or bad, need no apology. Praise of them is 
rather a superfluity and an impertinence. But 
v/hen power had slipped out of the hands of the 
upper classes, to justify the social precedence 
that remained, people began to look about for 
something of an inherent and permanent nature 
to admire. The gradual contraction of their 
privileges removed, too, the " wicked lord " from 



IV.] in Fictio7i. (^j 

romance. His opportunities of wickedness were 
gone. Earls could no longer kidnap pretty- 
women. Moreover, the rise of a powerful class 
of merchants, into a social prominence scarcely 
less than that enjoyed by them in Cromwell's 
time, fixed the attention of society upon the 
graces of the older aristocracy. The poor clergy- 
man was glad to feel that the people who snubbed 
his wife were nobodies by the side of his patron. 
It was perhaps rather pleasant to a banker's 
clerk to know that there were , persons before 
whom his own despot would have to take off 
his hat. 

But the novel has been the peculiar literary 
staple of the last thirty years. The upper classes 
have been of great use to the playwrights and the 
story-tellers. The throng of tutors, governesses, 
and young professional men who write for the Lon- 
don magazines, have relied much upon the dramatic 
capabilities of their unequal society. The fortunate 
classes anywhere will always be excellent material 
for art, providing those classes are known to the 
entire society. The people like to look at them. 
They take the sore of pleasure in them which they 

H 



98 The British Upper Class, [iv. 

experience at a fete or a pantomime. They wish 
them well, as they like the novels and the plays to 
end happily. The converse is also evident. So 
soon as these classes cease to appear fortunate 
they cease to be attractive. The cause of the 
Queen's recent unpopularity is to be found, not 
in her seclusion, nor in the discontent of the 
tradesmen who live upon Court patronage, but in 
the natural aversion of men to the lachrymose and 
the melancholy. The elegant classes here cannot 
be used to very great advantage, because a farmer 
in lUinois has a most indistinct and hazy notion 
of the habits of a person of fashion in New York 
or Boston. Moreover, here nobody knows exactly 
who these classes are. Abroad, this '' fine " society 
is the most distinguished and conspicuous. Here 
it is the little set whose particular boast is that 
" nobody knows anything about it." 

The reaction which followed the French Revo- 
lution ; the glory to which England attained during 
the first third of the present century, to which she 
was certainly led by the upper classes, and upon 
which she lived until very lately ; the gradual 
diminution of the privileges of the upper class 



IV.] in Fiction, 99 

and the sense of security from their encroachments 
— all these things disposed the English .people to 
think very favourably of their aristocracy. Their 
impressibility and credulity and their curiosity 
about the aristocracy have been fed by the 
novelists. Many popular mistakes concerning the 
manners of the " great " have thus been encouraged. 
Thackeray even has lent countenance to the super- 
stition that the young men are marked by a certain 
graceful and reckless generosity. It would seem 
natural that men who have assured wealth, and a 
station at the top of society, should exhibit towards 
each other a simple friendliness and an unthinking 
generosity, not to be found among people who are 
compelled to jostle and elbow each other in the 
struggle for subsistence. But I did not find it to 
be so. Lord Kew gives Jack Belsize ever so many 
thousand pounds. But the Lord Kews are scarce 
in real life. Not only is it hard to find men who 
give each other fortunes, but Lord Kew's spirit is 
not at all the spirit of the men I saw. The money 
they won from each other in the card rooms and 
at the races, they were very anxious to get and 
very willing to keep. Indeed, men who are on 



lOO The British Upper Class [iv. 

stated allowances, as many of them were, are 
compelled to exercise a systematic forecast in the 
matter of expenses, which a man who can stretch 
his income by a little extra labour will scarcely 
take. As to the gracefully reckless kindness, the 
shop-boy is quite wrong in his notions upon this 
point. So far as I could see, they did not feel 
more kindly to one another than the brokers who 
scream each other hoarse in the New York Stock 
Exchange. Indeed, I believe that, as a rule, they 
are the most ready to help others who have most 
ably helped themselves. 

Another of the misconceptions of the middle 
classes which the novelists have flattered is that 
their superiors are so accustomed to superiority 
that they have forgotten all about it. They think 
nothing of their distinction, it is said. On the 
contrary, they are always thinking about it and 
always talking about it. They roll it under their 
tongues like a sweet morsel. A friend of mine 
wrote to a certain very great and exalted person, 
asking whether we should or should not dress for 
a political dinner at Richmond. He answered 
pithily : " The snobs dress ; the gentlemen don't/' 



IV.] in Fiction. 



lOI 



I may here say that the most elegant men in dress 
and behaviour are not those in whom pride of 
lineage is strongest. Your man of stern family 
pride rather despises any such distinction as fine 
clothes and fine manners can ^wo. him. When you 
see an individual with his hat knocked over his 
eyes or his collar awry, you may know that he 
secretly hugs an escutcheon to his bosom with a 
fervour and energy of which no dandy is 
capable. 

Thackeray's charge against the English, that 
they are virtue-proud, is certainly true. They 
think themselves the best people in the world, 
and after one notable exception has been made, 
I am inclined to agree with them. Of unkindness 
to foreigners upon their own shores they are un- 
justly accused. They are, however, defiant in 
their behaviour to strangers, and at this point 
they have been educated in another misconception. 
They cherish the impression that their reserve is 
in some way a scrutiny of the character of the 
individual who is a candidate for the honour of 
their acquaintance. But this is a mistake. They 



102 The B^dtish Upper Class, [iv. 

bold back till they are sure, not that he is virtuous, 
but that it will help them to knov/ him. The 
young Englishman chooses his friends just as the 
young American or the young Frenchman does. 

It is the way of the world to regard success and 
fortune as another sort of character, and here 
again the English are no exception to the rule. 
Gentle manners to the poor and dependent, and 
a conciliatory bearing towards acquaintance, are 
praised, if the man who possesses them is a person 
of consequence. The English say, " He knows 
who he is ; " " Nothing can be better than he." 
In such a man rank seems to pass for a kind of 
virtue. But a seemly behaviour is not difficult to 
people who have no opposition. You do see men, 
however, in England, in whom good manners 
are only another sort of heroism. Life is not to 
them a pleasant saunter among tolerant equals and 
obsequious inferiors. I have known men with 
strong, fierce hearts and the consciousness of 
power and ability, who, unrecognised and in irk- 
some and difficult positions, are yet able to conduct 
themselves with propriety and dignity. There are 



IV.] i7i Fiction, 103 

rages which comC; we know not whence, and moods 
in which it is difficult to remember principles, yet 
these men learn to control them. They behave 
with a self-respect which does not verge upon 
truculence, and with a complaisance which does 
not approach servility. 

The present tone of the fashionable novel is not 
that of the aristocratic romance of the early part of 
the century. It is not even the tone of Coningsby 
or Maltravers. To the story-v^a'iters of " Cornhill " 
and "Fraser" the nobleman is no longer picturesque, 
or superior, or haughty, or aquiline. The purpose 
of these later writers is to present him as a good 
deal more like most people than anybody else. 
The young Bohemians laugh flippantly at the " fat 
old duchess ; " the glib governesses pour much 
scorn and contempt on " Lady Booby's old, 
rattling, broken-down barouche." The countess is 
deaf and has an ear-trumpet ; the marchioness 
is an honest old termagant, with a voice and 
temper like a fishwoman's. But this method of 
treatment insinuates a familiarity, very delightful 
to the average British reader. It is only another 



I04 The British Upper Class in Fiction, [iv. 

sort ot aamiration. The change, however, seems 
to be in the direction of truth, and the EngHsh will 
in time, no doubt, get back to a healthy and 
common-sense treatment cf this subject. 




Presumption. 



The East is ignorant of the West, the West 
is unduly sensitive to the unconsciousness of the 
East. It is so in this country. St. Louis com- 
pares itself with New York, and Kansas City 
with St. Louis. This succession extends all the 
way from London to the Sandwich Islands. 
Before Mr. Bret Harte had won his present fame, 
I remember to have met a lady from the Pacific 
who told me that he was the Irving of California. 
Now, Irving used to be called the Goldsmith of 
America, and, I suppose, we shall shortly have 
a Bret Harte of the Sandwich Islands. The in- 
distinct, hazy way in which an eastern com- 
munity thinks of one to the west of it, is 
extremely tantalising to the latter. That such 
a way of thinking of Canada is common in this 



1 06 Presuniption. [v. 

country may explain in part the hostility of the 
British Provinces towards ourselves. Until 
recently most of us thought of the Canadians 
as a sort of modified Esquimaux. In the same 
way the English are ignorant and incurious 
about ourselves. We, on the contrary, are all 
curiosity and interest in the English. An 
American has no sooner stepped into the streets 
of Liverpool, felt the exulting certainty that he 
is really in the old world, read the signs of the 
butchers, brewers, and bakers to the Queen, 
and wondered at the voracity of the great per- 
sonages of the kingdom, before he begins to ask 
himself in what way these people differ from, 
and in what way they resemble his countrymen. 
This is a matter upon which the English are 
not at all exercised. That comfortable people, 
sitting contentedly on their firm anchored isle, 
are under no pressing necessity of comparing 
themselves with anybody. The English, certainly, 
have this advantage, if it be an advantage. The 
longitude of character and custom is reckoned 
from Greenwich. 

The English very justly charge that Americans 



v,j Presumption. 107 

are self-assertive. The American at home is not 
an especially self-assertive person, or has, at any 
rate, ceased to be so. But when in Europe our 
people have nothing to do, and are away from 
their friends ; the people they meet, on the con- 
trary, are in the midst of their native society, 
and of their life-long employments. It is natural 
that some defiant or not altogether decorous 
advances should be made by strangers, who have 
any quantity of time on their hands. In Eng- 
land, especially, there is some temptation to this, 
from the manner of many of the people. Som^e 
would say, I know, that this is a topic upon 
which it were best to keep silent. To expostulate 
with presumption is not the proper way to meet 
it. Presumption never means to be reasonable, 
but only to be successful. When you expostulate 
witlo^ an arrogant man you acknowledge the 
success of his arrogance, which is all he asks. 
A friend of mine, an Englishman, objected to 
Mr. Lowell's paper, " On a certain Condescension 
in Foreigners," that you should never "let them 
know you see it." Now that is well as a rule for 
behaviour, but when one is writing, one is sup- 



io8 Presumption. [v, 

posed to tell the truth. If, as a consequence, the 
complacency of a man two or three thousand 
miles away may be increased thereby, why really 
that is no matter of the author's. How foolish 
it would have been for Mr. Lowell to have 
assumed an attitude with which to pique and 
tantalise an entire empire. 

The mere fact that an Englishman is so much 
nearer the centre of the world makes him seem to 
himself a better man than an American. This is 
especially manifest in third-rate men, your " gods 
of war, lieutenants-colonel to the Earl of Mar." 
They in some way imagine that their geo- 
graphical advantage is a personal one. I once 
sat at dinner near a gentleman of this rank, who 
had been in correspondence with a very dis- 
tinguished soldier of the War of the Rebellion. 
Somebody observed that the General was a good 
letter-writer. " Oh yes," said the Colonel lan- 
guidly, " I kept the letters." Here was a little 
Crimean Colonel, who was actually condescending 
to preserve the letters of one of the most il- 
lustrious living members of his own profession, 
than whom he plainly thought himself a greater 



v.] Presumption, 109 

man. I was at a loss to explain it. I believe, 
though, that the fact that the General Hved so 
far away, and had no famous London or Paris 
with which to identify himself, was the uncon- 
scious cause of this feehng. 



Eiiglish Coitrt Festivities. 



Americans have an impression that the EngHsh 
think it a considerable distinction to be presented 
at Court. But the ceremony of presentation has 
entirely ceased to have any social significance in 
England. Any young gentleman who imagines 
that the door of English Society will be thrown 
open to him on the publication of his appearance 
at a drawing-room had better save the expense of 
a dress and carriage and stay at home. If a lady 
be ambitious of a social success, the money which 
a robe will cost might be expended to equal ad- 
vantage anywhere else in London. However, a 
lady's dress may be worn again, and men may hire 
a court-suit for the day at a very small cost. Your 
tailor, if you get a good deal of him, will patch you 



VI.] Efiglish Court Festivities, iii 

up something tolerable for very little ; so that 
sartorial expenses are comparatively light. One 
can get for the afternoon a two-horse brougham, 
with a coachman and footman, for a sum less than 
ten dollars. Still, going to Court costs something, 
and its only possible advantage is that the spectacle 
is a fine and an interesting one. One has therefore 
to consider whether the sight is worth the fee. 

A presentation at Court is of quite as little 
advantage to an Englishman as to a foreigner 
coming to England. Almost anybody can be 
presented, and of those who are precluded from 
presentation, a great many occupy higher positions 
than many of those who have the privilege of going 
to Court. Any graduate of a university, any clergy- 
man, any officer in the army, is entitled to go. A 
merchant, an attorney, even a barrister, cannot ; 
and yet in England a barrister, or for that matter, 
a successful merchant, is apt to be a person of 
more consequence than a curate or a poor soldier. 
The Court has scarcely any social significance in 
Englnnd. I once asked a young barrister if pre- 
sentation would help him in the least in making 
his way in society. He said, " Not a bit.'' 



112 Ejiglish Court Festivities, [vi. 

Tn England the position of everybody is so well 
fixed that people cannot well change it by wishing 
it to be changed. Thus, for a poor East London 
curate to go to Court would simply make him 
ridiculous The parsons in the West-End d?/ 
present themselves, but there is no part of the 
British empire where clergymen are of such slight 
consequence as in the West-End of London. The 
clergymen, as they file in along with the gaily- 
accoutred young guardsmen, have a meek and 
gerjtie air which makes one feel that thej^ liiid 
better have stayed away. No person who is not 
already in such a position as to need no pushing 
could becomingly make his appearance at Court. I 
remember in Shropshire to have heard a family 
who went down to London to be presented made 
the target for the ridicule of the whole neigh- 
bourhood. 

Invitations to the Court festivities are given only 
to those persons presented in the diplomatic circle. 
It must be understood that there is at every court 
in Europe a select and elegant and exclusive 
entrance, by which the diplomatists come in. 
Along with them enter also the ministers of state 



VI.] English Coti7^t Festivities. 113 

and the household officers of the Crown. The 
general circle, as it is called, includes everybody 
else. Another entrance and staircase are provided 
for it, and in that way all of British society, from 
a duke to a half-pay captain, gains admittance 
to the sovereign. When one is in the inside of 
Buckingham or St. James's Palace the same dis- 
tinction exists. The room in which the members 
of the royal family receive the public is occupied 
during the entire ceremony by the diplomatic 
circle. Other persons, after bowing to the Queen, 
pass into an ante-chamber. 

Though I say it is of but small social advantage 
to an Englishman to be presented, yet undoubtedly 
the greatest people in the empire attend Court, and 
are to be seen at the ceremonials and festivities at 
Buckingham and St. James's Palaces. At present 
the Queen holds drawing-rooms and levees at 
Buckingham Palace, and the Prince of Wales at 
St. Jameses Palace. The latter are attended only 
by gentlemen, and, though not so grand as the 
Queen's, are pleasanter. Trousers are allowed, 
instead of the knee-breeches and stockings which 
must be worn at all Court ceremonials where there 

I 



114 English Court Festivities, [vi. 

are ladies. At two o'clock — for the Prince is very- 
punctual — the doors of the reception-rooms are 
thrown open, and the diplomatists begin to file 
in. First come the ambassadors. It must be 
remembered that there is a wide difference be- 
tween an ambassador and an envoy or minister 
plenipotentiary. The original difference was that 
the ambassador was supposed, by a sort of tran- 
substantiation, to represent the person of his 
sovereign. He had a right at any time to demand 
an audience with the king. An envoy must see 
the foreign secretary. This, of course, has ceased 
to have any practical significance in countries which 
have constitutions ; and no doubt a minister can 
at any time demand an interview of the sovereign. 
It is still true, however, that an ambassador is 
accredited to the king, while an envoy is ac- 
credited to the foreign secretary. Practically, the 
difference is that an ambassador represents a 
bigger country, has better pay, lives in a finer 
house, and gives more parties and grander dinners. 
An ambassador has precedence of everybody in the 
country in which he resides, except the royal family. 
There are five countries which send ambassadors 



VI.] English Court Festivities. 115 

to England — Russia, France, Germany, Austria, 
and Turkey. These ambassadors enter the re- 
ception-room at the Princess levee in the order of 
seniority of residence. 

Behind each ambassador come the secretaries 
of the embassy. After the ambassadors come the 
ministers. The whole diplomatic corps moves from 
an ante-room into an apartment in which the Prince 
of Wales awaits them. The Prince and several of 
his brothers and cousins stand up in a row. Next 
to the Prince, on his right, stands Viscount Sidney, 
the lord chamberlain, who calls off each detach- 
ment as it approaches — " the Austrian ambassa- 
dor," " the Spanish minister," " the United States 
minister,''^ &c. The Prince shakes hands with the 
head of the embassy or mission, and bows to 
thd secretaries. When the diplomatists, cabinet 
ministers, and household officers have all made 
their bow, it is the turn of British society. '1 he 
diplomatic circle, and such as have the entree to it, 
remain in the room : the Englishmen pass out. 
The Lord Chamberlain in a loud voice calls off 
the name of each person as he appears, so that 
each comer is, as it were, labelled and ticketed. 



ii6 English Court Festivities. [vi. 

One may often guess the rank or importance of 
the courtier by the manner of his reception. If he 
shakes hands with the Prince, you may know he is 
somebody — if he shakes hands with all five or six 
of the princes, you may know he is a very great 
person. But if he gives the princes a wide berth, 
bows, hastily and glances furtively at them, and 
runs by skittishly, then you may know that he is 
some half-pay colonel or insignificant civil servant. 
Something, too, may be inferred from the length 
of time the Lord Chamberlain takes to decipher 
the name of the comer on the slip of paper which 
is handed him. If he scans it long and hard, and 
holds it a good way from him, and says, " Major 
Te — e — e — bosh — bow," then in a loud voice, 
" Major Tebow," you will be safe in thinking 
that Major Tebow is not one of the greatest of 
warriors or largest of landed proprietors. 

The ceremony lasts an hour and a half or tv/o 
hours, and during the whole of it the talk and 
hand-shaking among the diplomatists go on very 
pleasantly. There is a great deal of esprit de corps 
among them, and perfect equality. Attaches, 
secretaries, and ministers walk about through the 



VI.] English Court Festivities, 117 

room and exchange greetings. The ambassadors 
are rather statelier : these do not mix themselves 
with the crowd of diplomatists, but stand up apart, 
all five in a row, leaning against the wall. 

At all other Court entertainments ladies are 
present. Of course there are a great many very- 
pretty ones, and their toilets are brilliant. The 
Queen's levees are very much longer than those of 
the Prince of Wales. Then, at all ceremonials 
where there are ladies, men are compelled to wear, 
as I have said, silk stockings and knee-breeches, 
shoes, and buckles. One can support this costume 
in tolerable comfort in a warm room, but in getting 
from the carriage to the door it is often like 
walking knee-deep in a tub of cold water. A 
cold hall or a draught from an open door will give 
very unpleasant sensations. In many of the large 
rooms of the palaces huge fireplaces, v/ith great 
logs of wood, roar behind tall brass fenders. Once 
in front of one of these, the courtier who isn't a 
Scotchman feels as if he would never care to go 
away. Fortunately, most of these ceremonials are 
in summer, but the first of them come in February, 
and London is often cool well up into June. 



ii8 English Court Festivities, [vi. 

The ceremony of a presentation to the Queen 
is quite the same as that at a Prince of 
Wales's levee. The class of royal ladies stand 
up in a rigid row. On the Queen^s right is the 
Lord Chamberlain, who reads off the names. Next 
to the Queen, on her left, is the Princess of Wales, 
then the Queen's daughters and the Princess 
Mary of Cambridge. Next to them stand the 
princes, and the whole is a phalanx which 
stretches entirely across the room. Behind this 
line, drawn up in battle array, stand three or 
four ranks of Court ladies. 

The act of presentation is very easy and 
simple. Formerly — indeed, until within a few 
years — it must have been a very perilous and 
important feat. The courtier (the term is used 
inaccurately, there being no noun to describe a 
person who goes to Court for a single time) was 
compelled to walk up a long room, arid to back, 
bowing, out of the Queen's presence. For ladies 
who had trains to manage the ordeal must have 
been a trying one. Now it has been made quite 
easy. There is but one point in which a pre- 
sentation to the Queen differs from that already 



VI.] Ejiglish Cozn^t Festivities, 119 

described at the Prince of Wales's levee. You 
may turn your back to the Prince, but after 
bowing to the Queen you step off into the crowd, 
still facing her. There (if you have had the good 
luck to be presented in the diplomatic circle) 
you may stand and watch a most interesting 
pageant. To the young princes, perhaps, it is 
not very amusing; but there is plenty in it to 
occupy and interest the man who sees it for the 
first or second time. You do not have to ask 
"Who is this.?" and "Who is that.?" The Lord 
Chamberlain announces each person as he or 
she appears. You hear the most heroic and 
romantic names in English history as some boy 
or old woman appears to represent them. One 
sees a number of beautiful persons. The young 
slips of girls who come to be presented for the 
first time, frightened and pale or flushed, one 
admires and feels a sense of loyalty to. 

The name of each person is called out loudly 
by the Lord Chamberlain. The ladies bow very 
low, and those to whom the Queen gives her 
hand to kiss nearly or quite touch their knee to 
the carpet. No act of homage to the Queen 



I20 English Court Festivities, [vi. 

ever seems exaggerated, her behaviour being so 
modest and the sympathy with her so wide and 
sincere ; but ladies very nearly kneel in shaking 
hands with any member of the royal family, not 
only at Court, but elsewhere. It is not so strange- 
looking, the kneeling to a royal lady, but to see 
a stately mother or some soft maiden rendering 
such an act of homage to a young gentleman 
impresses one unpleasantly. The courtesy of a 
lady to a prince or princess is something between 
kneeling and that queer genuflection one meets 
in the English agricultural districts : the props 
of the boys and girls seem momentarily to be 
knocked away, and they suddenly catch them- 
selves in descending. It astonished me, I re- 
member, at a party, to see one patrician young 
woman shake hands with a not very imposing 
young prince, and bend her regal knees into this 
curious and sudden little cramp. I saw her, this 
adventurous maid, some days afterward in a 
hansom cab, directing with her imperious parasol 
the cabby to this and that shop. 

This odd jumble of the new and the old 
struck me again and again wherever I turned. 



vA J English Court Festivities, 121 

The mysterious scarlet coaches rolled along 
Piccadilly side by side with the smart waggons 
of the Cheshire Cheese and Butter Company. 
To the traveller who idles away a balmy morn- 
ing in Green Park, can he resist for a moment 
the blue hues of the Abbey towers, and the warm 
shining greensward, this impression is often 
present. The goblins wont to disport themselves 
in the mediaeval moonshine have been suddenly 
overtaken by a flood of commonplace daylight. 
There is the veritable St. James's Palace. But 
no Charles drives forth from its open portal as 
in the gay pictures on the curtains of the theatres. 
The v/ord belated expresses the general impression 
which the monarchical and aristocratic fabric of 
English society makes upon the observer. It is 
like the banquet-hall the morning after the ban- 
quet ; the goblets are overturned, the dishes half- 
emptied, and the strong sunlight pours in upon 
the silent chamber, long deserted by the revellers. 
The levees and the drawing-rooms may be 
called the Court ceremonials. There are, besides, 
the Court festivities, or the balls and concerts at 
Buckingham Palace. There are four or five of 



122 English Court Festivities, [vi. 

these given in a season — two balls and two 
concerts. The balls are the larger and less select, 
but much the more amusing. The ball-room of 
the palace is a large rectangular apartment. At 
one end is the orchestra — at the other a raised 
dais on which the " royalties " sit. On each side, 
running the length of the hall, are three tiers of 
benches, which are for ladies and such gentlemen 
as can get a seat. The tiers on the left of the 
dais are for diplomatists. English society has 
the tiers upon the other side. By ten the ball- 
room is usually filled with people waiting for 
the appearance of the royalties. The band strikes 
up, and the line of princes and princesses ad- 
vances down the long hall leading to the ball- 
room. The Queen and Prince Albert used 
formerly to preside at these balls. The Queen 
does not come now : the Prince and Princess of 
Wales take her place. 

First enters a line of gentlemen bearing long 
sticks. Behind them come the princesses, bowing 
on each hand. The Princess of Wales advances 
first, with a naive, faltering, hesitating step, a 
strange and quite delicious blending of timidity 



VI.] English Court Festivities. 123 

and child-like confidence in her manner. Then 
come, walking by twos, some daughters of the 
Queen. A German duchess or two follow her. The 
courtesies of these German princesses are indeed 
quite wonderful. After entering the hall one of 
them will espy (such, I suppose, is the fiction) 
some persons to whom she v/ishes to bow, and 
she then proceeds to execute a performance of 
some minutes' duration. Before courtesying, she 
stops and looks at the persons to be saluted 
as a frightened horse examines intently the 
object which alarm.s him : she then sinks slowly 
backwards almost to the ground, and recovers 
herself with the same slowness. It would seem 
that such a genuflection must be, of necessity, 
ridiculous. But it is not so in the least : it is 
quite successful, and rather pleasing. After the 
ladies come the Prince of Wales and his suite. 
The royalties then all go upon the stage, and 
after music the ball begins. 

There are two sets of dancers. The princes 
and princesses open the ball with the diplomatists 
and some of the highest nobility on the space 
just in front of the dais. The rest of the hall 



124 English Ccurt Festivities. [vi. 

is occupied by the other dancers, who later in 
the evening find their way into the diplomatic 
set. The dancing in . the quadrilles and Lancers 
is of a rather stately and ceremonious sort. In 
waltz or galop the English mostly dance the 
same step, the deux temps, and the aim of the 
dancing couple is to go as much like a spinning- 
top as possible. They make occasional efforts 
to introduce puzzling novelties like the trois temps, 
the Boston dip, etc., but, I am glad to say, with- 
out any success. The result is, that once having 
learned to dance in England, you are safe. 

The great hall during the waltz is a brilliant 
spectacle. There are many beautiful women, the 
toilets are dazzling, and all the men are " flaming 
in piirple and gold." There is every variety of 
magnificent dress. Officers of a Russian body- 
guard are gold from head to foot. Hungarians 
wear purple and fur-trimmed robes of dark 
crimson of the utmost splendour. The young 
men of the Guards' Club in gold and scarlet 
coats, and m spurred boots which reach above 
their knees, clank through the halls. Scotch 
lords sit about, and exhibit legs of which they 



VI.] English Cotirt ^Festivities. 125 

are justly proud Here, with swinging gait, 
wanders the Queen's piper, a sort of poet- 
laureate of the bagpipes, arrayed in plaid, and 
carrying upon his arm the soft, enchanting 
instrument to the music of which, no doubt, the 
Queen herself dances. The music of the orchestra 
is perfect, and he must be a dull man who does 
not feel the festivity, the buoyancy, and the elation 
of the scene. 

The dress which our diplomatic representatives 
are now compelled to wear at the Court ceremonies 
and festivities needs a word of mention. Our 
people in America are somewhat conceited, some- 
what prone to be confident, upon questions of which 
they know very little. Congress, at a distance ^ 
of some thousands of miles from courts, thought 
itself competent to decide what sort of Court dr^ss 
an American diplomatist should wear. An able, 
though crotchety man, brought forward a measuie, 
and, once proposed, it was certain to go through, 
because to oppose its passage would have been to 
be aristocratic and un-American. Mr. Sumner's 
bill required Americans to go in the " ordinary .» 
dress of an American citizen." There was no 



126 English Court Festivities. [vi. 

attempt to indicate what that should be. Up to 
that time our diplomatists had worn the uniform 
used by the non-military diplomatists of other 
countries. This consists of a blue-coat with more 
or less gold upon it, white breeches, silk stockings, 
sword, and chapeau. 

An attempt or two had been made before 
by the State Department to interfere with the 
trappings of its servants abroad. Marcy issued a 
circular requesting American diplomatists to go 
to Court without uniform. This afforded James 
Buchanan an opportunity of making one of the 
best speeches attributed to him. The circular of 
Mr. Marcy threw consternation into the breasts of 
certain ancient functionaries of the European 
courts, for shortly after its appearance the Lord 
High Chamberlain in waiting, or some other 
member of the Queen's household, called upon 
Mr. Buchanan, who was then the United States 
minister in London, and said that a certain very 
distinguished person had heard of the recent wish 
which the American government had expressed 
with regard to the costume of its agents, and that 
while she would be happy to see Mr. Buchanan in 



VI.] English Court Festivities, 127 

any dress in which he might choose to present 
himself, she yet hoped he would so far consult 
her wishes as to consent to carry a sword. " Tell 
that very distinguished personage," said Mr. 
Buchanan, " that not only will I wear a sword, as 
she requests, but, should occasion require it, will 
hold myself ready to draw it in her defence." This 
strikes me as in just that tone of respectful exagge- 
ration and playful acquiescence which a gentleman 
in this country may very becomingly take toward 
the whole question. Neither Mr. Buchanan nor 
anyone else, I believe, heeded the request of the 
Department, and Mr. Marcy himself, it is said, 
subsequently repudiated it. 

But what was only a request of the State 
Department in Mr. Marcy's time is now a law. 
I had good opportunities to know how very un- 
comfortable the poor American diplomatist is 
made by this piece of legislation. Its object was, 
of course, to give him a very unpretending and 
subdued appearance. The result is, that with the 
exception of Bengalese nabobs, the son of the 
Mikado of Japan, and the Khan of Khiva, the 
American legations are the most noticeable people 



\Ar\ 



128 E^iHish Court Festivities, [vi. 



%b 



at any Court ceremony or festivity in Europe. 
When everybody else is flaming in purpl^ and 
gold the ordinary diplomatic uniform is exceed- 
ingly simple and modest ; but the Yankee diplo- 
mates are the most scrutinised and conspicuous 
persons to be seen. 

The dress in which our diplomates attend Court 
at present is a plain dress-coat and vest, with 
knee-breeches, black silk stockings, shoes, &c. 
It is difficult to see in what sense this is the 
" ordinary dress of an American citizen.^' The 
dress is not so ugly as it would seem to be ; 
indeed, with the help of a white vest and liberal 
watch-chain, it might be made quite becoming 
were it not so excessively conspicuous. An 
English cabinet minister at a party given in his 
own house usually wears it, and all persons invited 
to the Empress Eugenie's private parties came got 
up in that manner. But in London it was not till 
recently that American diplomatists were allowed 
to go to Court even thus attired. Everywhere else 
in Europe the United States legations were ad- 
mitted in evening dress, the concession of knee- 
breeches not having been required. But at 



vl] English Coicrt Festivities. 129 

Biickincrham Palace no Americans were admitted 
without the proper garments. The consequence 
was, that our legation was compelled to stay at 
home. This state of things continued until 
Reverdy Johnson came out, who arranged what 
was called "the Breeches Protocol.'' Owing to 
the unreasonable state of the public mind during 
his term of office, this was the only measure 
which that good and able man succeeded in 
accomplishing. The compromise which Mr. 
Johnson's good-humour and the friendly impulse 
of the British public toward us at that time wrung 
from the chamberlains and gold-sticks of St. 
James's (for you may say what you will, public 
opinion is irresistible), was to allow the minister 
and the two secretaries of legation to appear in 
the breeches above described. Americans who are 
presented at Court, and who get invitations to the 
festivities, are all required to wear a Court dress. 
Of what good compelling the poor diplomatists to 
make scarecrows of themselves may be I do not 
know. Mr. Sumner's proposition was just one of 
those absurdities to which men are liable who have 
considerable conscience and no sense of humour. ^ 



130 English Court Festivities. [vi. 

Senators and members of Congress fell in with it 
because they feared to be un-American, and be- 
cause it is not their wont to be very dignified or 
(in matters of this sort) very scrupulous. 



English Tradition and the 
English Future. 



The admiration of the novelists of thirty yeats 
ago for the British upper class was a symptom 
of the admiration by the English of that period 
of everything pertaining to themselves. Each 
Englishman felt (read, for instance, Ford's " Hand- 
book of Spain") as if he himself had discovered 
gravitation, written " Childe Harold," conquered 
Waterloo and Trafalgar, and perished upon the 
Plains of Abraham. The aristocracy was at the 
top of British society, and of course great. So 
that it is diiticult, m readmg tne chronicles of 
the manners of that day, to distinguish oetween 
what is laudation of a class, and what is laudation 
of the Empire and the period. The novelists 
can find no words in which to insinuate the im- 



132 English Tradition [vii. 

mense immaturity of anybody who would with- 
hold his applause. Zoroaster and Confucius 
would smile with wise tolerance upon the cynic 
and the radical, and would cheerfully assist 
society by showing themselves at the assemblies. 
Zanoni, with the personal acquaintance of every 
interesting individual of the race from Adam 
down, Bulwer would have thought nothing of 
until he had entered him at the clubs, introduced 
him to the party chiefs, and given him enough 
of the current coin of the realm to astonish the 
lackeys. That writer describes with excess of 
definition the Parliamentary leaders. It is neces- 
sary that we should be able to recognise to a 
shade these prime figures in the most important 
arena of the world. We are not permitted to 
forget the majesty of these persons even when 
they are satirised. Readers of "The Caxtons" will 
remember a letter on colonisation, from the 
statesman Trevanion to the young Pisistratus. It 

- is up ! we are 



in for it for two mortal hours." This letter is 
dated from the House of Commons, and the 
Library of the House of Commons ! Yet notice 



VII.] and the English Future. 133 

the very light way in which the letter leads off. 

^' VV is up," said in three words, and such 

short and indifferent ones, too. How fascinating 
is the disrespectful allusion in the next clause. \ 

" We are in it for two mortal hours." W is 

tiresome, no doubt, but can you help admiring 
the point of view of that man who can make 
sport of him.? The reader must remember the 
impression made upon him in youth by a descrip- 
tion of that most important event, a change of 
government. There is a most impressive one in 
Mr. Disraeli's "Coningsby." At three o'clock in 
the morning, while the boys in the waiting-room 
of a club in Pall Mall are asleep, a gentlema.n 
(I forget his name, but we will call him Mr. 
Gervase Hastyngs) rushes in breathless and a?q- 
nounces that Lord Derby has been to see tli.e 
Queen, and that Peel has just been sent for 1;o 
form a government. How striking is the con- 
trast between the commonplace accidents of the 
scene and the tremendous importance of the 
moment. One would expect a portent in the 
sky to announce such an event. There is a new 
government, and it is only the breathless Gervase 



134 English Tradition [vii. 

Hastyngs and the hall-boy in buttons who have 
heard of it. Ah, sleepy Islington, drowsy Clerken- 
well, you honest tradesfolk soundly snoring in 
Clapham, Fulham, Brixton, Hampstead, and High- 
bury, little you know what goes on among your 
betters at three o'clock in the morning. 

But very little of this arrogance of victory 
and supremacy remains in England. The tone 
at present is rather one of diffidence and dis- 
content. There are those who profess to believe 
that England has lost her ancient courage and 
her warlike spirit. Now, a nation which has the 
virtues and the advantages of peace cannot expect 
to have also the virtues of war, except in a 
dormant and potential way. To hear the talk 
of some persons, you would think that war is 
the state of society for which peace is the pre- 
paration, instead of peace being the state of 
society for which war is the preparation. Courage 
is a means, and not an end, and it is shown in 
fighting for the things we want. Englishmen of 
the present time are not willing to make war for 
what they do not very much desire. But ought 
they not to wish to keep their country in its 



VII.] mid the English Future: 135 

position at the head of the world, which it held 
fifty years ago ? Any such obstinate deter- 
mination would surely show a great lack of 
political intelligence. The times change and we 
change. The new conditions of the Empires of 
Russia and Germany and the silent influence 
exerted by this country have altered the face of 
the world. England does not greatly desire to 
hold her old place, because she feels that she 
cannot hold it, and it is only lunatics who refuse 
to cut their coat according to their cloth. But 
as to the charge of a want of patriotic feeling 
and the spirit which takes men well into battle, 
there can be no truth in it,, as any man among 
the millions who heard the fife and drum play 
before Sir Garnet Wolseley^s returning legions 
could have known from the beating of his own 
heart. The tumult of the crowd and the sight 
of the pathetic ranks of real warriors reveals in 
the breast of the plainest citizen possibilities of 
which at average moments he does not dream. 

The English now propose to lead the world in a 
new way. When we go to heaven, we are told, we 
shall not have fine wines and costly apparel, but 



136 Eiiglish Tradition [vii. 

we shall not miss them, because we shall have 
ceased to cherish these carnal desires. The 
English think — at least that portion of them which 
Mr. Gladstone represents — that while it is true that 
they are not hereafter to lead the world after their 
old fashion, yet that fact should not make them 
unhappy, for in the new order of things the nations 
will set little store by mere physical victory. The 
first duties of a state will be the education of its 
citizens and the advancement of mankind. The 
greatest state shall lead the world, not in selfish- 
ness, but in unselfishness. That state shall be 
greatest which is supreme in ideas and .in tlie 
useful arts. Of course, there can be^no disputnig 
the truth of this principle. If the English have a 
more highly educated population than we, purer 
domestic life, a more dignified press, a move 
honourable administration of government and of 
justice, they are better than we, though we crowd 
the Continent with our money-getting millions. 
Gladstone's view is, undoubtedly, the highest, and, 
undoubtedly, the best, provided always that the 
state is strong enough to pursue its high purposes 
in security. 



VII.] and the English Fithire, 137 

But it seems to me not so improbable that the 
dream of the English Liberals may have an easy 
realisation. I know that an American editor in 
his third or fourth letter home is not unlikely to 
say something of the palpable decadence of the 
English power. The observation is often made 
regretfully, as if the discovery caused him a pang. 
It is not difficult to understand the state of mind 
in which these regretful paragraphs are written. 
His landlady is the only person in the great wil- 
derness who knows him. Nobody marks him. 
Not a soul in the restaurant or the omnibus 
recognises him. The main street of the city in 
which his own paper — the Chronicle and Evening 
Advertiser — is published has no place in the imagi- 
nations of the people he meets. He is naturally 
interested in the points of difference betv/een the 
newspapers there and at home. But there is i.a 
the broad, decorous columns of the Times, as they 
lie open before him in the coffee-room of his inn, 
an obvious and depressing ignorance of the 
Chronicle and Evening Advertiser. He believes 
in his heart that the managers of the Times never 
heard of his paper. If the editor of the Chronicle 



138 English Tradition [vii. 

and Evening Advertiser is at all a splenetic person, 
he will shortly have occasion, with mournful im- 
partiality, to suggest the "political decline," the 
" germ of social disorder," &c. &c. 

As for the "germ of social disorder," if the 
labour question is to be the end of English society, 
it will be likely to be the end of us also. I am not 
sure that there is to be a " political decadence." I 
think that England will find physical security while 
pursuing the course which her Liberal statesmen 
have marked out for her in the moral support of 
the English race the world over. The idea of race 
is good only up to a certain point. Because a 
certain number of people in many parts of the 
earth speak the same tongue (some of them very 
detestably), it would be very unreasonable that 
they should join hands against everybody whose 
patois is different. But so long as England con- 
ducts herself with reason, and with that obvious 
ambition to act justly which now marks her, she 
will be sure of the sympathy of the Anglo-Saxon 
race. She will not need support, moral or physical, 
if she withdraws within herself and limits her pur- 
poses by the " streak of silver sea " which separates 



VII.] and the English Future. 139 

her from her enemies. But should she feel it her 
duty to continue her beneficent endeavours for the 
civilisation of her remote dependencies, she will 
find that the Pan-Anglican sentiment may do her 
good service. The silent feeling of the race, even 
if understood to be but tepidly friendly, will go far 
to preserve her from extremities. England will be 
strong in proportion as she has the moral support 
of the race. As I suppose it to be a mere matter 
of arithmetic that for the next few hundred years 
this country will contain the physical mass of the 
race, I may go farther and say that England will 
be strong in proportion as she has the moral 
support of this country. Secure in that support, 
there is no reason why, with her universities and 
her highly educated upper class, she should not 
continue to teach and lead us as she certainly does 
teach us and lead us at present in almost all the 
departments of thought and civilisation. Why 
should not London be the capital of the race > 

In such a state of things the diminutive size of 
England will be a part of her good fortune. Gold 
is precious because there is so little of it. When 
the world is full of people who look back to her as 



1 40 English Tradition and the Future, [vii. 

the home oi their tradition, she will be happy in 
that her soil will not be capable of dilution. There 
are leagues upon leagues in America and Australia, 
but it may be said with pride and affection that 
there are only a few meadows and a stream or two 
In England. 1 suggest this point for the considera- 
tion of any American who is to speak at a London 
public dinner. Let the orator assure his hearers 
that the race in Lidia, in Africa, in Australia, in 
America — wherever the Anglo-Saxon pursues his 
heaven-given prerogative to subdue nature and 
society — will constitute a mighty moral empire, 
of which this little island will be the sacred and 
inviolable home, and he will be certain to sit down 
amid applause. 



Childhood aiid Rnglish 
Tradition. 



A POINT I have not seen made much of is the 
hold which English tradition and fable and 
fiction get upon the mind of infancy in this ** 
country. When young eyes first open with 
fresh wonder upon the world, the scenes of 
English life come in upon us from a hundred 
sources. Perhaps these impressions are not so 
strong now as in the days before the war. I see 
that the school readers now have pictures of the ' 
Pacific Railroad with the buffalo scampering 
from the coming engine. But in my day the 
pictures in the reading-books were all English ; 
the pictures were English, even if the books were 
of American composition. The lessons were 
mainly English, and had to do with English 



142 CJiildhood [viii.. 

things. It was before the pahng of an English 
cottage that we saw the bent old man, whose 
age we were told to revere and pity. It was 
from an English casement that the little girl let 
the captive robin out of the cage. I was ten 
before I knew that the lark was not an American 
bird, and, on being told that I should have a day 
in the country, remember promising myself that 
I should hear the bird about which so much was 
said in McGuffey's " Second Reader." The good 
boy in that little volume was always rewarded 
with a tart. Now, I doubt if anybody living in 
Maryland, Virginia, or thereabouts, had ever 
eaten a tart, or had seen one to know it by that 
name. I am sure I never had. But, for that 
matter, neither had a poet of the last century 
ever seen an Amaryllis or a Chloe, or heard a 
shepherd piping in the shade. I must have known 
that " tart " meant " sour," yet so perverse is the 
imagination that I conceived it to be a sort of 
transfigured sugar-plum. 

The costume worn by the little boy in the 
educational work just referred to vv^as quite unique. 
I fancy it must have been the English fashion 



VIII.] and English Tradition. 143 

of dressing boys of twenty years earlier. The 
cap was peculiar, though about the year '56 we 
had something like it called the " Pancake." The 
collar was a broad band of linen worn outside 
the jacket. But the portion of his apparel with 
which I was most profoundly impressed was a 
pair of incipient swallow tails. The possession 
of these did not seem to make him any happier, 
he had become so used to them. They invariably 
attended him in the orchards, the meadows, the 
gardens, and wherever his sunlit young existence 
wandered. Envy of many a childish day-dream, 
and quite as wise, I think, as some of the more 
recent ones, how often I pondered them while 
the cherry-trees stood alone in the silent play- 
ground, or the echoes of the feet of a solitary 
passer-by came with a sound of strange and 
audacious freedom from the pavement of the 
street below ! The little fellow had them on 
when he and his sister wandered too near the 
bee-hive. When he looked toward the rising sun, 
with one hand pointing to the South and the 
other to the North, it was these little coat-tails 
he turned to the West. 



144 ChildhoGfi [viii. 

The household pictures in " McGuffey " all were 
English, and the groups were certainly presented 
in an amiable light. How good and virtuous 
were the families who trimmed the evening lamp 
in the pages of McGufifey's " Second Reader ; " 
the father, how firm and prudent ; the mother, 
how wise, how tender, how solicitous. (Indeed, 
the grown people in children's books are always 
paragons. The readers of the " Rollo Books " 
will remember that Rollo's father and mother 
appeared to have been born parents ; think of 
Rollo's father and mother ever being divorced !) 
There was a picture in " McGuffey '' of the little 
boy I have described walking out at sunrise with 
his mother to hear the sky-lark. She has told 
him of dawn and the song of the lark. He has 
been but seven short years in the world and can 
remember but four of them ; seven years, which 
in the life of a grown man pass as a week or a 
month passes. He has never seen the sun rise, 
but from report and picture he is as familiar 
with it as if he had witnessed it in Eden. His 
mother is holding him by the hand, and they 
are passing a high wall. It is the moist, whisper- 



VIII.] and Bnglisk Tradition, 145 

ing dawn of a summer's day. Up in one corner 
of the picture is a little spot which is, of course, 
the lark, and it is pouring a flood of melody- 
over the scene. The reader may know what 
that picture must have been to boys whose 
meadows were the morning-glories which skirted 
the brick pavement of the kitchen-yard while 
they waited for their breakfasts, whose butterfly 
was the winged and dusty grasshopper which 
tells of August and the close of the city summer ! 
The sunrise is not often seen by children, except 
when they are waked early for some picnic or 
festival. So it is a good theme for the young 
imagination. The English sunrise has, besides 
the lark and the milkmaid, all the charming 
accompaniments of the chase. Whatever con- 
fusion there may have been about larks and 
cuckoos, we all knew that only in the English 
valleys was heard the horn of the huntsman. 
There is in the window of a saddler's shop in St. 
James's Street, near Pall Mall, a coloured en- 
graving of a landscape at sunrise. In the fore 
ground is to be seen a mounted huntsman amid 
a pack of hounds. The picture was familiar, for 

L 



146 Childhood [viii. 

years before I had often come upon it, thrust 
away in a corner, soiled and torn, in an old 
garret, where I went in search of lost treasures 
among handirons and broken hobby-horses. The 
huntsman^s honest plebeian face tells of service 
for the happy, sleeping people whom his horn 
will soon summon to the chase. The dawn 
wakens softly over meadows that have not yet 
begun to shine. He blows his trumpet, and his 
jolly cheeks are puffed as he startles the dim 
dwellings and the drowsy landscape with its 
saucy echoes. 

Now such impressions and recollections as 
these, existing as they do in many thousands of 
minds, are of very great importance. They are 
of real political significance. How ready is an 
American to greet in England any realisation 
of these dreams of his childhood ! With what 
pleased recognition does he exclaim, " Oh, this 
is you ! " and " I have heard of you before." I 
once went upon a visit to a friend of mine, who 
was an ofhcer in a yeomanry regiment at that 
time mustering in a town in one of the western 
shires of England. The colonel, to whom I was 



VIII.] and English Tradition, 147 

introduced, had been a younger son, had gone 
into the army and been to India. But he had 
come into his property, and was now a country 
squire with a large family and handsome for- 
tune. I at once recognised the kind of man. 
They said he had eleven daughters. (What a 
fine old English sound they have !) During the 
mess dinner the regimental band played from a 
hall adjoining. The colonel, who had put me 
next him, said, " I wanted to see if the band could 
play ' Yankee Doodle,^ but I find they don^t know 
if" "How good of you!'-* I exclaimed, depre- 
cating the mention of such a distinction. " Yes, 
yes," he answered, with the determined manner 
of one who, though now an old rustic, perhaps, 
had yet, in his youth, seen something of the 
world, and knew how things should be done, " I 
believe in every honour for the diplomatists." As 
I sat there listening to his honest talk, my mood 
grew strangely friendly. " Should war's dread 
blast against them blow," I felt that I wished to 
be ranged on the side of the kind colonel and 
his eleven daughters. 



The Dancmg-School in Tavistock 
Square. 



In London, in order to "get on," one must be 
great or famous, or one must dance. Unless a 
man is a very decided catch and an object to the 
" mammas," or is enough of a Hon to make him fit 
for exhibition, dancing is about his only utility. 
The average London man of society thinks dancing 
a very slow amusement. He is either athletic 
and prefers hunting and yachting, or he is dis- 
solute, and simple pleasures pall upon his jaded 
appetite. As a rule, too, the important young 
men do not dance. The greater a man is, the 
more is he careful to abstain from anything which 
will make him entertaining. His dulness is always 
in proportion to his distinction. The same holds 
true with regard to . conversation or to any other 



IX.] The Dancing-School. 149 

sort of contribution to the amusement of others. 
He only is agreeable and clever from whom fortune 
has withheld better gifts than talent or the power 
of pleasing. He only would be witty who is with- 
out solid advantages. A " talking man " is in 
danger of being snubbed, and nobody can help 
pitying the ridiculous fellows who sing at the 
afternoon " musicals.'" 

To be sure, all young people dance. How 
would " golden youth " be possible if there were 
no ball-rooms ? But when men get toward five- 
and-twenty, those who can afford not to dance 
desert the balls for the concert-saloons. Young 
noblemen and eldest sons will spend a few moments 
at the parties, and as a great favour to the hostess, 
will walk through a quadrille with the prettiest girl 
in the room. But how can one who has at hand 
the cancan and the casinos find amusement in any- 
thing so puerile as the waltz .-* Who cares to talk 
to humdrum cousins when one may drink bad 
champagne with painted women in a gilt cafe near 
the Haymarket t It is only cadets, clerks in the 
Treasury, youths with no particular expectations, 
who dance. Among diplomatists, attaches waltz ; 



150 The Dancing-School [ix, 

a councillor or secretary may under protest. I 
knew one excessively light-headed envoy who 
would dance now and then, but who always took 
care to dance badly. 

The talk of the young men concerning balls and 
parties is, however, to be taken with some caution. 
They are " bores," and this tone the poorer young 
men catch from the more fortunate swells. A 
clerk in one of the offices, when I asked him his 

destination, said, " To this ball." Of course, 

the young man would have been very sorry not to 

have got a card, but he shuffled off to " this 

ball " with the air of a martyr. Dancing young 
men, however, are scarce enough to make ladies 
who give parties anxious to get them ; and if one 
is going to a ball, though it may be more dignified 
to walk about ' sokes and stare, it is certainly 
pleasanter to dance. 

Accordingly, when a diplomatic appointment 
made me a resident of London, I determined to 
learn to dance. Cato learned Greek when he was 
eighty, and I was twenty-five before I could do the 
detix temps. I was reared in a pious household, in 
which dancing was thought to be wicked. After 



IX.] 171 Tavistock Square. 151 

leaving college I acquired a notion of my own 
dignity quite inconsistent with so frivolous a 
pastime. (I give my experience in this matter at 
some length, because I know it will represent that 
of a great many others.) But, of course, I outgrew 
this dignity in time, and came to look upon tl.at 
notion as only another and rather small sort of 
coxcombry. Between your frivolous and your 
philosophic coxcomb I much prefer the former, 
as the more amiable of the tvv^o. What possible 
relation had the conduct of my legs to the universe 
and the moral law ? My fear of dancing was a 
symptom of that timidity and strength-destroying 
self-consciousness which possesses so many people 
of the present day. They are enamoured of 
superiority, and they associate certain external 
images with the fashionable types of greatness 
they admire. A little energetic thinking would 
easily rid the victim of such reverie. What this 
philosophic coxcomb really fears is not the essential 
unworthiness of the pastime, but the impression of 
himself he reflects in the minds of lookers-on. 

Omne igiioUmi pro minfico, says the proverb. I 
should have been taught to dance in order to learn 



152 The Dancing-School [ix. 

that dancing is no very wonderful thing. A man 
who could put his arm round the waist of a pretty 
woman, and calmly trust himself with the guidance 
of his floating argosy of lace and tarlatan about a 
ball-room, was formerly to me like a being from 
another sphere. I could not understand how that 
man felt. His ego was an exalted mystery. A 
few steps at Brooke's academy would have taught 
me that this man was but mortal, and might have 
cured me of my depressing sense of inferiority. 

I once did attend the dancing-school of a little 
village in Western New York. This- village was 
the seat of a very radical water-cure, in the chapel 
of which there was a service on Sundays and a 
dance on Tuesday evenings. The ladies were all 
in Bloomer costume, and as the institution was 
radical socially as well as in religion and politics, 
the cooks, laundresses, and chambermaids were 
always asked to the balls. These were, in fact, 
the only healthy people present. Your vis-a-vis 
was usually a lady with an affection of the neck or 
a gentleman with a wet towel round his forehead. 
One gentleman, I remember, with a towel about 
his head and a neck awry, had a chair set for him 



IX.] in Tavistock Square. 153 

which he occupied while the side couples were 
dancing : when the time came he sprang up with 
great alacrity, gallantly and playfully flung out his 
right foot, and walked through the step in the most 
punctilious manner. 

One's imagination was not fascinated by the 
felicity of whirling round the room one of these 
invalids in short clothes and trousers. Still, I did 
go to the village dancing-school with the intention 
of learning to waltz. But I found it was only the 
little girls who were pupils : their sisters merely 
came to look on and chat. I did not care to enact 
the directions of the master before all the smiling 
young society of Bunbury. The only pupil of 
riper age I ever saw at the school was Miss 
Carker, the lady doctress from the water-cure. 
She was dressed at the time almost like a man, 
and her hair was parted on the side. She pre- 
sented herself as a scholar, and the professor, who 
had never seen her before, was sorely puzzled 
where to put her. He did not like to ask her. 
There was a long continuous row of children 
standing at the time, the upper half of which 
were girls and the lower half boys. The professor 



154 The Dancing-School [ix. 

wittily extricated himself by placing her just in the 
middle and letting her decide for herself. 

In London I found it quite necessary that I 
should put myself under the care of some in- 
structor, and I was commended to the academy 
of Mrs. Watson, in Tavistock Square. Tavistock 
Square, the reader will remember, is situate in the 
dim regions of Bloomsbury, once an aristocratic 
quarter, but now quite given up to lodging-houses 
and the private dwellings of attorneys and mer- 
chants. Here lives on the second floor an 
economical widow, who supports a- son at the 
university ; a Spanish conspirator, Communist, or 
exile of the Thiers government occupies the third ; 
an American Senator, even, who is verdant or un- 
ambitious, may find his way v/ith his family into 
the first. Upon the whole, it is a gloomy neigh- 
bourhood. All Bloomsbury has much the same 
look — the most unlovely part of London, or indeed 
of England. For my part, I believe I prefer Seven 
Dials. 

Mrs. Watson was a very large ^woman. She 
was, however, a very good and agreeable person, 
and an excellent teacher. There were besides 



IX-] in Tavistock Square, 155 

several nieces, rather pretty girls, who assisted 
her in the education of the young men. It seemed 
to me an odd sort of profession for a young lady. 
Twelve hours out of the day and twelve months 
out of the year they were saying, " Take my right 

hand with your left, and put your right arm " 

This latter instruction the preceptress did not 
finish in words, but the pupil seemed to compre- 
hend his duty by intuition. " That is very well," 
said the lady. 

These young ladies were very nice, and of 
course perfectly respectable, but they did not 
appear to me to be envied. Society is not kind 
to a poor girl in England. That her position here 
is different is due not to any superior charity or 
chivalry of ours, but to our luckier circumstances. 
Society in Europe assumes toward her that tone 
of scarcely concealed contempt which the strong 
and successful must inevitably hold towards the 
weak. The talk of the young men concerning 
her is, I think, not so respectful as in this country. 
Of course, where such a sentiment exists, the 
dignity of the objects of it must be somewhat 
impaired. It is only the exceptional people who 



156 The Da7tcing-SchooL [ix. 

can resolutely hold their own sense of themselves 
against the mood of society. 

These ladies, I say, assisted Mrs. Watson, She 
herself usually undertook the initiation of the 
patient. Mrs. Watson was not only large, but 
strong, resolute, and conscientious. Moreover, 
she was not a person to put up with any indolence 
or false shame on the part of a pupil. I had for 
years been enamoured of passivity. " I do not 
like to be moved," says Clough. That poet and 
much-musing philosopher liked to feel himself 
at the centre of innumerable radii of possibilities, 
rather than as moving in any one line by which he 
was plainly and irrevocably committed. But Mrs. 
Watson was not a person to encourage any in- 
decision of this kind. After a preliminary word 
or two she took me firmly by each hand and began 
jumping me back and forth, saying, "One, two, 
three, four," &c. Be it remembered that I was the 
only performer in the room, and that all the lady 
assistants and a pupil or two, who were waiting 
their turns, were looking on. Mrs. Watson, be- 
coming satisfied with my proficiency in the piston 
movement, wished to see what I could do in a 



IX.] in Tavistock Square, 157 

rotary way. She began by sending me round the 
room by myself, spinning like a top. When I 
gave signs of running down, she struck me again 
on the arm and sent me round faster. Really, 
for a person with some pretensions of sobriety, 
this was pretty thorough treatment. I was sure 
the young assistants must be screaming with 
laughter, and I was not sorry when I passed 
into the hands of these milder and less muscular 
preceptresses. 

I was very proud when I had learned the deux 
temps. I really thought myself a very accom- 
plished young man. But Mrs. Watson said that it 
was quite necessary, absolutely indispensable, that 
I should learn the trois temps. I had got on very 
well with the deux temps, but what labours I under- 
went in the acquisition of the trois temps, and what 
giggling of the lady assistants I braved, and what 
screams of stifled laughter from a very jolly cousin 
of Mrs. Watson, who was visiting from the country, 
and who came in to look at us, I will not here 
relate. I was absolutely made to stand on one 
foot and hop. It was incredibly painful, but I 
bore it all, as children take medicine, because I 



158 The Dancing-SchooL fix. 

thouc^ht it was good for me. The reader wDl 
lancy the bitterness of my feelings when I dis- 
covered that it was all in vain. The trois temps 
was not danced at all in London : the deux temps 
was universal. 

There was no personage of the dancing-academy 
in Tavistock so interesting to me as its mistress, 
Mrs. Watson, whose gentle and dapper little 
husband played the violin. Mrs. Watson was 
rarely seen except on great and critical occasions. 
Her full habit of body and long service entitled 
her, she thought, to repose. But she would now 
and then walk with majesty and old-time elegance 
through a figure of a quadrille, taking hold of her 
petticoat with thumb and finger of each hand, and 
coquettishly fanning and flirting it. She did not 
often waltz or galop, but sometimes, in enforcing 
a lesson, she would commit herself to the undula- 
tions of the dance, and sail or swim about the 
room, sola. She was as a rule a very good, kind, 
and sensible woman, and she had, moreover, a few 
fine antique graces which she would bring out 
when circumstances seemed to call for them. 
Among these was a very superb method of leaving 



IX.] in Tavistock Square, 159 

the room which she gave us occasionally. If the 
conversation turned upon fine society (I believe 
she thought me rather a man of fashion), and if 
she had seen my name in the Morning Post that 
morning, she would treat me to one of these. " I 
bid you good morning," she , would say ; and 
lifting her petticoat with thumb and finger, she 
executed a retreat backward with some six steps, 
and, laying her hand upon the door-knob, vanished 
with a peculiar grace and dignity. 

Of the school in Tavistock Square, besides the 
accomplishments which I there gained, and which I 
highly prize, I retain a little memento in the shape 
of Mrs. Watson^s "Manual for Dancing," a tiny book 
which now lies on my table. It contains, besides 
descriptions of quadrilles, polkas, galops, &c., 
much excellent advice upon general behaviour., 
which recalls the little institution quite vividly. 
Occasionally the little document becomes severe, 
almost sarcastic. "All skipping, hopping, and 
violent motion should be restrained." Again we 
are told that vis-a-vis must not meet each other 
" with proud looks and averted glances," but " with 
a smile" and "a pleasant recognition." "True 



i6o The Dancing-School, [ix. 

politeness is entirely compatible with a kind dis- 
position. In our higher classes unreserved and 
agreeable manners prevail much more than in the 
middling ranks of society." 



Contrasts of Scenery, 



I HAVE never been so struck with the sublimity of 
great cities as in August eventides in the depths 
of dog-days. At such an hour, when in London, I 
used to go to Trafalgar Square. Instead of the 
usual paltry plots of grass, that square has a broad 
floor of stone, which immensely enhances its im- 
pressiveness.* Only a few weary feet broke the 
stillness of the place. The golden clouds of dust 
choked the vistas of the streets. Silently out of 
their grimy mouths the fountains glided. I heard 
all round the desolate roar of the city. The granite 
column seemed borne upward and to swim in the 

*' There is a profuse and profound wealth of fancy and expression 
in this line of one of the sonnets of Shakespere, — 

**Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time." 



1 62 CoJitrasts of Sce^iery [x 

air, and Nelson from its summit looked far away 

^ to Egypt and the Nile. 

Art is stronger than nature in the old countries. 
Nowhere in England do you ever get well out of 
London ; the town inflames the island to its ex- 
tremities. London is strong as disease is strong. 
Many a time, swinging about the streets in the 
"gondola of London," the hansom cab, I have 
wondered that so great a place should be so lozv — 

■^ should have so little height. The inequalities on 
the surface of an orange, we are told, vastly 
exaggerate the hills and valleys of the globe. 
London is scarcely higher than if the surface of 
the earth upon which it lies had been scratched 
with a file. Yet so potent has it been to change 
the entire face of that part of the world which it 
dominates. 

Nature has been chased out of England into the 
sea. In Europe man is scarcely conscious of the 
presence of nature. Here nature is scarcely con- 
scious of the presence of man. Perhaps, indeed, on 
our Atlantic border, she is just waking to a sense 
that her rest is broken by the foot of the intruder. 
But in England nature has been quite subjugated. 



X.] Contrasts of Scene7y, 163 

The fence and the furrow are everywhere. You 
find yourself by a lonely tarn at the bottom of a 
sweet breathing ravine, and you say, " Surely here 
is something primeval ;" but you have only to look 
up to where the sharp back of the mountain cuts 
the sky, to see a stone fence riding it with a giddy 
tenacity, and holding on for dear life. We miss the 
feelings with which newer and wilder scenes inspire 
us. English scenery is always pleasing, perhaps 
the most agreeable for any common condition of 
mind that can be found. Nowhere is there such a 
pretty country to have picnics in. What wind so 
careless as that vv^hich fans the cheeks of August 
tourists, whose table is spread half-way up some 
hlU-side in Devon t In the morning, when the 
youth of the day supplements the age of nature, 
then we see the English landscape in its best. 
The air is sweet and the sod greener than else- 
where, and the foldings of the hills and hollows 
are lovely and surprising. But the beauty is for 
the eye ; it fails to touch the heart. This seemed 
to be true even of the scenerj- in Wales. It was 
very impressive. The Welsh mountains were very 
old ; the wind o^ the heather wandered gravely 



1 64 Cont'i asts of Scenery. [x. 

from the sweet, sad fields of the most distant 
part ; the verdure of the margin of that shining 
estuary that sets up to Dolgelly, through the 
greenest green, is enriched by the yellow of the 
buttercups. 

Nevertheless there was an incompleteness that I 
could not suppose to be altogether in myself, for 
the ocean had its moods as sublime or bright as 
where its evening waves flow round the light-ship 
at Sandy Hook. The waters came to the cottage 
thresholds and to the gates of the gardens. Late 
one afternoon, as I sat looking over the blue, bright 
ocean, there came under my window a proud- 
stepping fellow with a plaid, and a feather in his 
bonnet, playing upon the bagpipes. A pure and 
stainless sunset was approaching. The sweet 
breeze from the heather ran about the streets at 
will. Far out over the quiet, flickering waters 
wandered the notes of the bagpipes, flew, and 
were wafted westward. The children danced 
about the piper, and their feet moved to the 
music and to the fast-changing moments of the 
sunset. But the landlord came out before the door 
bare-headed and rang the bell, and the bagpiper 



x] Contrasts of Sceneiy. 165 

ceased suddenly and went away with the children, 
and the sun dropped down behind the wave, and I, 
with that rude haste with which we extinguish 
delights we know to be too evanescent — went to 
dinner. 

For the purposes of comfort the English climate 
is better than ours. I have heard this denied, but 
am sure that it is so. One has only to remember 
that the fashionable hour for horseback riding in 
London is from twelve to two in the summer 
months. Nobody can ride at that hour any- 
where in this country. The equestrian here has 
a choice between sunrise, sunset, and moonlight ; 
unless, as used to be common in the South, he 
rides with an umbrella. But for poetry and the 
observance of nature our climate is better. The 
English summer never commits itself It is always 
lingering April or premiature October. If you go 
out at night to walk in the moonlight or to sit by 
the sea-shore, you must take an overcoat. Here, 
about the last of June, we have a sweltering week 
or two, in which everybody unlearns the use of 
overcoats. We then understand that it is summer, 
and that it will stay summer. To be sure, if you 



1 66 Contrasts of Scenery, [x. 

are in search of some poor churlish spot where 
you may forego nature and the miracle of summer 
for the sake of keeping cool, you may find it on 
the coast of Maine. But if deeper pastimes entice 
you, and more verdurous hill-sides ; if you would 
sit in some rose-embowered porch, while yet the 
blue-eyed mist lingers in the farthest recesses of 
the mountain gorge, then it is to the Susquehanna 
or the Kanawha you must go. There, where the 
chestnut shade cools the edge of the hot, humming 
meadow, you may lie, your hands stained with the 
dark, deep clover. On indolent afternoons your 
scow will float through those silent scenes, you 
hearing only the dull lapping of the river at the 
thirsty keel. 

I may here say that one great disadvantage for 
any person desiring to look at an English land- 
scape is the absence of good fences to sit upon ; 
the ground is usually too damp to permit one to 
lie full length. I missed very much the rail fences 
of my own country. I would come to a pretty 
prospect, and my legs sinking under me, I would 
look about for a place to sit. The inhospitable 
landscape had not a single suggestion. There 



X.] Contrasts of Scenery. 167 

were no stones, and a hedge was, of course, not 
to be thoup-ht of. How different the stake-and- 
rider fences of this land of ours ! The top rail of a 
good fence is as fine a seat as one can wish. Of 
course, much depends upon the shape and posi- 
tion of the rail. Sometimes the upper rail is 
sharp and knotted. But one has only to walk 
on for a rod or two before a perfect seat can 
be found, and this point I have discovered to be 
the very best from which the scene may be viewed. 
It really appears as if the honest farmer had 
builded better than he knew. If there is one 
place from which to overlook a landscape to be 
preferred to another, I have always found that 
nature, so far from betraying him that loved her. 
had actually put there the properly shaped rail 
at his disposal. 

The streams of England are unclean. Waters 
that the poets have made famous smeii abominably. 
Consider the task the poets would have to immor- 
talise all the running water of our Atlantic slope. 
Unsung, unnamed even, with pure noises thev 
hasten to their river-beds. For many miles by 
the railway whicn traverses North Wales, the Dee 



1 68 Contrasts of Scenery. [x. 

brawls along with a tumult of green waters. From 
the car window it looked enticing, and I thought 
I would stay over a day at Llangollen and walk 
along the banks. At Llangollen is " The Hand," 
over which presides a gentle and unique landlady, 
who carries a bunch of keys, and greets you with 
that curious cramp of the knees called a courtesy. 
(If you would see a courtesy, you must go to 
England very soon, for the Radicals will have put 
a stop to it in a year or two more.) There was 
hanging in the coffee-room a picture of Sir William 
Somebody, the great man of the neighbourhood. 
His left arm he rested upon the withers of a great 
black hunter, while his wife, buxom and beautiful, 
leaned upon the other. Some happy dogs were 
playing about his feet. There were two or three 
more engravings of the kind well known to fre- 
quenters of English inns. Upon a table in the 
middle of the room were the cold meats, the pies, 
the tarts, the custards, and the berries. In the 
corner, a lunch was spread for two collegians who 
were travelling with their tutor. All this you 
saw to the music of the old blind harper, Vv^ho 
sat just outside the door by the high clock in 



X-] Contrasts of Sccr.ery, 169 

the windy hall. Here, too, was the prettiest girl 
I saw in Wales. She told me she was sixteen, 
and I believed her. You talk of strawberries and 
cream — a namby-pamby and silly expression — she 
was blackberries and cream. She was there with 
her brother Arthur, a youth two yearc; older than 
herself, the guide, philosopher, and financier of the 
party : the pair were the children of a Bristol 
music-teacher. We lunched together, and the girl 
cut the pie with her own hands. Slie had been 
twice to London. When I asked her wdiere she 
stayed when she came there, she said, "At Mr. 
Hawkins's," as if that were enough. Was there 
ever such a delightful answer ! 

I tell this because it is only fair to Llangollen 
that I should. Any little nameless stream in the 
Shenandoah Valley is better than the Dee. But 
in the tavern near there would have been no 
landlady with the keys, nor the really good music 
of the harper, nor the table spread with tarts and 
berries, nor very likely the pretty girl. The green 
waters of the Dee, cool and clean enough a few 
rods off, I found, when I came nearer, washing 
over noisome, stinking rocks. I followed the slip- 



170 Contrasts of Scenery, [x. 

pin^ banks a mile or so, and then took the 
macadamised road that runs above the river. I 
very soon found my way back to the inn, and 
went with Arthur and his sister to a village enter- 
tainment. We sat upon the front bench, and saw 
a burlesque of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 
performed by four metropolitan stars, upon a stage 
eight feet by twelve. 

I have spoken of art as strong and of nature 
as weak in the Old World. In scenes in which 
art and nature mingle, England, I suppose, is 
unsurpassed. The little I saw of rural England 
was mainly on Sundays, and then I could rarely 
get far away from London. There are influences 
which nature appears to borrow from society. The 
Christian Sunday seems to impart to the pristine 
beauty of our own landscape an intenser purity. 
Here, where the virgin altars are set up in glades 
whose stillness is broken only by the noise of the 
primeval streams, where the spires shine afar over 
our summer wildernesses, the face of nature is 
conscious of the religion of man. There is, on a 
Sunday afternoon, in the long street which climbs 
the hill of a New P^ngland village, an unattainable 



X.] Contrasts of Scenery, I'ji 

seventy, an almost bitter silence. On a Sunday 
morning, when the village bells are silent, to me, 
sitting under the trees of an orchard in blossom, 
there is in the air a strange reproof, a pungent 
purity, which renders obvious a canker in the 
midst of the blue sunlight and the bloom. These 
impressions must of course exist in England, 
though my occupations in London were such as 
to give me little leisure to taste the wild silences 
and asperities of the rural Sunday afternoon. In 
one of the few suburbs of London yet compara- 
tively free from the ravages of convenience and 
respectability, there was an old green-walled gar- 
den-plot, to v/hich I was permitted to repair at 
that hour. I sat alone upon a broken, dirty, iron 

bench (I beg the T 's pardon for calling their 

bench dirty), and under an old pear-tree. It was 
a long patch of sod and flowers. The brick walls 
were rent and decayed, and, except where the 
peach and the vine covered them, were green 
with moss and black with age. The neighbouring 
gardens I only knew by the tops of the pear and 
may-trees. No sound came from them save the 
rustle of their greenery, which now and then dis- 



172 Contrasts of Scenery, [x, 

turbed the heart of the quiet hour. Of the children 
who played in them, of the maidens who knelt 
among their flowers, I knew nothing. The same 
sunshine and yellow haze filled them all, the same 
Sabbath silence. From out their narrow plots ail 
looked upward to the same blue sky. I used to 
think that the gardens never ended, but lay side by 
side the island through, and that the sea washed 
them ail around. 



New York and London Winters. 



An English winter all men have agreed to con- 
sider as the greatest discomfort under which the 
inhabitants of the Isles suffer. The day is dark 
by two, and one can scarcely read before ten in the 
morning. Yet the densest, yellowest fogs in which 
poor Londoners grope from house to house to find 
their door-bells, the all-day rains tnat drown the 
cabbies, and shadow the large, dark, hospitable 
windows of the inns — all these are very pleasant, 
soothing, and inviting in comparison with such 
persistent slush and foul weather, such protracted 
out-of-door misery as we suffer sometimes in New 
York. There is a jerking and incessant quality 
in our winter weather. It is no sooner allayed 
and softened than it is up and at it again_, until 
patience can support it no longer, and one yields 



174 New York [xi, 

one's self to be jolted along by fate. An English 
winter is disagreeable rather than violent ; it is no 
such tax upon human nerves and patience as our 
own. Of course, your feet are never clean ; your 
eyes smart with the fogs ; the east wind withers 
you ; but you are, somehow, soon beset with a soft 
and dirty uncomfortableness, to which, once having 
succumbed, you continue in contented subjection. 

We are not sure that the overhead London 
winter has not been a little slandered. The sun 
comes out at times very softly, and as you look 
over the wet sod and blue wintry thickets of Green 
and St. James's Parks, the towers of the Abbey 
catch from the air a natural or artificial blue, 
exquisite and quite indefinable. But they have 
nothing like the exhilaration of our cold moon- 
light and starlight heavens. They have nothing 
like our successive days of hard, bright weather. 
They have nothing like that frozen blue-green sky 
of our January nights, with the moon apparently 
congealed in the midst of it. On a late Sunday, 
looking over the bay at sundown, there arose a 
scene so wild, strong, and sublime, that the 
beholder could scarcely believe himself in the 



X.I.] and London Winters. 175 

midst of a city of a million people. The desolate 
bay, jammed with ice from the wharves to the 
wood-fringed Jersey hills, lay as silent and stern 
as any untrodden unfamiliar place in the heart of 
the Andes or the Himalayas. There is a vital 
hour of the landscape, which, at summer sunsets, 
is very evanescent. The day concentrates into its 
parting glance a swift, intense meaning. Turn 
your back upon it a moment, or shut your eyes, 
and it is gone ; but, on this evening, all around 
the city roofs, the hills, and the ice-fields, there 
lingered a deep, strong crimson almost frozen into 
the sky. 

The puissance of nature over man here, and 
its unconsciousness of him, even in the very 
ways of his cities, is strangely apparent to the 
European. We shoot about the rivers in our 
ferry-boats, and wheel in our omnibuses through 
the drifts of the streets, and all the time the snow- 
storms roar over us, and the whirlwinds enwrap 
us and hide us from skies which scarcely notice 
us, and shut us in from a world upon which we 
scarcely make any impression. 



The Evening Call. 



The evening call is a peculiarity of American life. 
The strict watch kept over the family would make 
that institution, as it exists among us, quite an 
impossibility on the continent of Europe. In 
England, where there is greater freedom for 
unmarried women, this evening cannot very well 
be used for calling, owing to the lateness of the 
dinner hour. The question of dinner is, indeed, 
very much involved in the matter. It is quite 
impossible that it should be later than six without 
either unhappily shortening that ceremony or 
infringing on the hour for the call. While dinner 
is certainly a pleasanter meal taken in the evening 
than earlier, we must remember that the evening 
is the best hour of the day for social enjoyment, 
no matter how we pass it. It is the instinct of 



XII.] The Evening Call, ly^j 

man to have the best thing last ; we should always 
be happiest just before going to bed. Yet in 
considering the question whether the evening is 
better as we pass it, or as the English do after an 
eight o'clock dinner, there is much to be said on 
both sides. Both ways are undoubtedly good, but 
upon the whole a change to the English custom 
would be rather for the worse. Comparing roughly 
i\\Qpros and co7is of the subject, we might say that 
the English habit is better for families, and our 
own better for the morals and well-being of the 
bachelors. 

We would certainly not underrate the m^agical 
effect of a dress coat and white bosom upon the 
drooping faculties. The English dinner makes a 
rubicon dividing by a broad line the day of work 
from the day of relaxation. The diner washes off 
the toil of the day with its soot and grime. No 
matter how tired or languid he may be, the more 
act of dressing seems to put a new song in his 
mouth. He becomes pert and audacious, and 
bears down upon his acquaintance with the delight 
and Pharisaic feeling of cleanliness and good 
apparel. He has a distinct consciousness of his 



178 The Eventing Call, [xii. 

linen. He is well aware of the difference between 
himself and any unclean thin^. All this is very 
pleasant. The English dinner certainly has this 
consideration in its favour, and for families even 
higher ones. 

But it bears hardly upon the bachelors, who 
transact their solitary meals with speed, and have 
nobody to go to see. On the score of comfort, 
though, some bachelors in England are very well 
off. The club men, as a rule, need no sympathy ; 
their misfortunes are not of the material kind. 
The miserable people are the men who are com- 
pelled to live at the hotels and restaurants. The 
British lion who stares out of the club windows 
is a well-kept contented beast. But there is no 
happiness for that lean creature who, as hunger 
possesses him, must lash his sides with his tail, 
and wretchedly reflect whether he will lie in wait 
at the nearest chop-house for whatever comes 
along, or daintily devour a bird or Two at the 
Pall Mall Restaurant, or pounce upon a leg of 
mutton at Simpson^s in the Strand. The club is 
the admirable result of long experience. Not in 
vain have the bachelors of the past lived and 



XII.] The Evenmg Call. 179 

suffered. Pretty furniture, good cooking, and 
agreeable company unite to make a pleasant im- 
pression. The dining-rooms, which are usually 
small, have perhaps a dozen tables, one of which 
the diner has to himself A wax candle is placed 
upon each, with a white paper shade about it. 
The cloths and napkins are spotless, and the 
glasses glistening. Men usually read at dinner, 
when alone, books or magazines out of the library ; 
and two men who have not much talk, even when 
dining together, will read. The young men usually 
dress ; and the room, with its pretty tables, and 
its florid, well-dressed occupants, makes an agree- 
able, appetising impression. Physically, then, the 
bachelors are well enough off. In other respects 
they are not so fortunate. Their privations begin 
when dinner is over. They must then go to the 
smoking-room, and have coffee and chat ; or, 
pleasantly gorged and fuddled, lounge and bask 
before an open fire. This, again, is not so bad, 
but they tire of it in time. The trouble is that 
one half of the great human race is excluded ; 
they wish to see that other half, and there is no 
place where they can find it. Ladies' society is 



i8o The Evening Call, [xn 

very difficult to be had, because families are at 
their pleasant and leisurely dinners. There may 
be, here and there, people you may run in upon ; 
but the universal opening of doors, which takes 
place from eight to nine in American towns, is 
quite unknown. The British bachelor, therefore, 
as he rises from his dinner at the club, is an object 
of commiseration. What is he to do till bed-time ? 
He may have a rubber of whist in the card-room, 
but that is expensive. He may go to the theatre, 
but the play is not always good ; and, if it were, 
he does not want the play every night, any more 
than waffles every morning. If he has force and 
restlessness, he is driven to all sorts of shifts to 
amuse himself. I knew one young gentleman whose 
post-prandial diversion it was to rush off to ride to 
fires on a steam-engine, and blow the trumpet. 
But for men gifted with less energy than this 
individual possessed, the last resort (sometimes we 
fear the first) is the society of the ladies who 
frequent the Argyll and the Alhambra. Many of 
those gentlemen, very likely, do not feel their 
privations. Most men about town in London 
might think the way of spending the evening in 



XII.] The Evening Call. i8i 

vog-iie among us exceedingly slow. But the 
vitiated taste is the result of the evil experience. 
Had they possessed our opportunities from youth 
they might have thought differently. 

But those fortunate people, whom fate has not 
compelled to toil, are comparatively rare with us. 
After a hard day's work, it must be a very ener- 
getic man who cares to ride to fires on an engine 
and blow the trumpet ; and for men who labour 
in the daytime, no conceivable relaxation, as a 
stand-by or staple, could be better than the evening 
call. It is fortunate that this very good thing, 
unlike most other good things, is easy to be had. 
Almost any young man, coming as a stranger into 
an American community, may at once secure the 
society of good and kind women. Of course, in 
any city, and almost in any village, there are 
people whom the young stranger will find It 
difficult to know. But there are plenty whom \lQ 
may know easily, and who are quite as good. 
There will always be some who think they have 
friends enough, and there v/ill be others who hold 
notions of chaperonage and surveillance, but the 
tide of democracy makes very little of these things. 



1 82 The Evening Call, [xil 

The young man will find friends somewhere to his 
mind, and such friends will usually be feminine, the 
indispensable quality men ask in their acquaint- 
ance. We say then that the stranger will find 
women who will like him, and they will be better 
than he deserves to know ; for in this country 
women are very equal in education ; the difference 
in mental and social culture between classes is 
mainly seen in the men. It appals Europeans 
to hear of the readiness with which strangers are 
received into Ai;nerican homes. But before we 
censure our way of doing, we have to consider 
two points. Is it good for the young men, and is it 
bad for the families into which they are admitted ? 
The advantage to any friendless young stranger is 
indisputable. A merchant in St. Louis has told 
me how, when a boy, he left his New Jersey home 
for the western town, which was then a week's 
journey off. The very evening of the day on which 
he reached St. Louis, by good luck he found his 
way to a parlour where there were an old piano 
and some young ladies, and these young ladies 
sang him " 'Way down upon the Swanee River." 
The lad was but seventeen when, to seek his home 



xTi.] The Evening Call, 183 

and future, he stepped down into the cold current 
of that dreary stream. He says that the song, and 
the kindness of the girls, warmed his chilled breast 
as with a cordial. We do not think that families 
have very much to fear from a very liberal opening 
of doors to strangers. There are dangers in our 
society, but things would not be helped by a more 
rigorous examination of candidates for admission. 
The probability is that if you do not like the 
candidate he will not like you, and will take him- 
self off before he can do you any harm. It is 
quite as safe to trust a countenance as the word of 
an introducer, though it is well to have both. The 
introducer is liable to mistake. Moreover, you 
have no security that the boy who grows up in 
the next garden to your own may not turn out a 
knave. We cannot but regret any movement that 
tends to narrow the possibilities of intercourse. 
Unluckily, it is our doom to know too few of the 
admirable people who exist. 

Society, as seen in the parlour of an American 
house by the evening caller, is the social unit or 
plenum — small enough to permit him to be a part 
of it if he chooses, and so large that he m.ay treat it 



1 84 The Evening Call. [xii. 

as a spectacle without being accused of staring. 
It suits everybody, from the plainest youth with 
the common gregarious instinct to the more con- 
ceited person who looks on and admires. I believe 
this simple institution is one of the best possible 
tests of the moral health of any epoch of one's life. 
There are two such gauges. If our minds are not 
open to nature, il it bores us to sit upon a fence 
and look over a darkling country for an hour after 
sunset (providing, of course, we have ever liked 
that sort of thing), we may think that something is 
the matter. This is a negative way of getting at 
the truth. But in the presence of the pure and 
beautiful our decadence is shown us plainly and 
unequivocally. Take the parlour of some house- 
hold where goodness and refinement are the family 
dower, and the voices of shame and strife come 
from the outside muffled through its windows and 
walls. The mother is there, and she may remain 
if she choses. The abolition of chaperonage has 
robbed her of her terrors. If she has kindness, or 
authority, or benignity, or any other beauty, we con- 
sider her all acquisition. A father or brother is not 
in the way. Then the daughters and sisters, or the 



XII.] The Evening Call. 185 

cousins who are visiting, sing, or crochet, or talk, 
or sit silent — it makes little difference which ; for, 
if they have grace and innocence, we defy them to 
move an arm, or thread a needle, or walk the 
length of the room, without . expressing it. There, 
in the deep and tranquil scene before us, we see 
written those stones of truth and purity that 
happily we may so often read in the broad pages 
of the book of human life. In such hours elevation 
and sensibility come of course. How grateful we 
are for whatever virtue we possess, how glad of 
past self-denial ! But if the late months contain 
an ugly recollection, how darkly it smites us that 
the truth cannot be told in this fair company. 



Ottr Latest Notions of Republics. 



There is something to me indescribably movin;| 
in the attitude of sympathy, yet of separation, 
which this country held towards Europe for the 
first third of the present century. That con- 
tinent was so far away we scarcely believed it to 
exist ; yet in our remote happiness and security 
we were unable for an hour to avert our eyes from 
the drama of human fate enacted within its cities 
and upon its plains. We later Americans can 
scarcely understand the wonder and attention 
with which the citizens of our earlier republic 
looked upon Europe. When the young ladies of 
that period gathered to tea-parties in my own 
native village, it was under the very shadow of 
the stone tower of the church where were said the 
longest prayers in all Virginia, that they thumbed 



XIII.] Our Latest Notions of Republics, 1 8 7 

albums containing pictures of Haldee and the 
Maid of Athens ; and who was it but Byron, the 
libertine and sceptic, that they held in their dear 
little Presbyterian hearts? My mother, in that 
mountain home, sang of the loves of Josephine 
and Napoleon, or thrummed upon the old piano 
to the humming-bird in the honeysuckle vine, 
the " Downfall of Paris." Thus did our early 
republic, nestling along the edge of the great 
unknown continent, hear the echoes of Europe. 
Each wind that swept the sun-washed sea brought 
tidings from the land of passion, and feud, and 
discord, and ambition. Armies met and perished. 
Patriots languished in prisons and expired upon 
scaffolds. But no blight reached those happy 
homes, only pity and enthusiasm. No rumour 
stirred for an hour the trance of our summer land- 
scape. The mountains yet stood silent ; the spires 
lingered in the virgin air ; still the wave of the 
ocean lapped the long glistening line of sand that 
rimmed our Atlantic border. 

Our early attitude towards Europe was one 
of separation. We admired Europe far more 
than we do at present, yet at the same time we 



1 88 Our Latest Notions of Republics, [xiir. 

were much farther away than now. We looked 
on with wonder and sympathy, and yet all the 
while prayed to be delivered from temptation. 
Unable to take away our eyes, we crossed our- 
selves. Mirabeau wrote a pamphlet in which he 
warned us that in the Cincinnati Society (which 
association, I believe, continues annually to eat a 
dinner somewhere) we held the germ of an aris- 
tocracy; and Virginia, with the charming simplicity 
of the time, refused to retain a chapter for this 
very reason. If you had told a patriot of that day 
that his dream of a republic would be one easy 
enough of accompHshment, that in fact it would 
be no such great thing when attained, that kings 
and lords were the simplest and most easily 
mastered of the obstacles in the way of human 
progress, that a state of society in which the 
humblest citizen could be elected to office might 
be a very immature one, you \\K)uld have nearly 
broken his heart. 

The passion for the spread of political liberty, 
so familiar to all cultivated and generous minds 
during the first half of the present century, has 
diminished very noticeably of late. Hardly .a ves- 



XIII.] Our Latest Notions of Repitb lies, 189 

tige remains of that enthusiastic sympathy which 
the people of that day j^ave to Greece and Poland. 
It is but twenty years since Kossuth, it is but ten 
since Garibaldi and the impulse of Italian unity. 
So that only in the last decade of years has the 
change of which we speak come over society. In 
Europe the phenomenon may be in part explained 
by the great interest the common people have 
taken in social questions. But in this country 
there has been much less interest in social ques- 
tions, and we must look for some other explana- 
tion of our apathy toward the spread of repub- 
licanism abroad, and of our want of enthusiasm 
and exultation over its indisputable establishment 
at home. I think that the decline of our aspira- 
tion for the spread and establishment of repub- 
licanism is the result, first, of the sense of the 
fulfilment of that aspiration, and, secondly, of the 
fact that we had greatly over-estimated both the 
difhculty and the importance of the task. America, 
with whose movements Europe has always so 
strongly sympathised, has had several kinds of 
patriots. The patriot of the years following our 
revolution was of a far more ardent and interest- 



190 Our Latest Notions of Reptiblics. [xm. 

ing type than his successor of the present day. 
His task was almost as new as that of Columbus. 
The world applauded, and admired, but doubted, 
and it would have been strange had he not felt 
the contagion of its disbelief He believed, but be- 
lieved with fear and trembhng. He was full of fore- 
bodings and warnings as to the fate of our liberties, 
had the lessons of Greece and Rome continually 
on his lips, and attached a superstitious value to 
Washington's dying utterances. The early patriot 
adored liberty, but with the ardour of the lover 
for his almost unattainable mistress. The patriot 
of the present has taken her, not for his sweetheart, 
but for his comely and contented bride. Comfort- 
ably he sits in dressing-gown and slippers, and, 
without surprise or exultation, sees her who was 
once his morning star tripping about his apart- 
ment, hanging ornaments on the bare walls, dust- 
ing away the cobwebs, and putting to rights on 
doorstep and window-sill some disorderly things 
which have long been a scandal and a reproach in 
the eyes of certain aris,tocratic old maids over the 
other way. Indeed, one might say that the patriot 
of the present finds his vocation a dull one. With 



xiii.] Our Latest Notions of Republics. 191 

human ingratitude and obliviousness, he hardly 
understands that he is a very happy man. If you 
tell him he is fortunate in his freedom from royalty 
and hereditary aristocracy, he is rather surprised. 
It is much as if the Swiss should congratulate him 
on not having the goitre. Really that is one of 
the things it had never occurred to him' to be 
thankful for. The American patriot of ten or 
fifteen years ago was also a person of more vigour 
and enthusiasm than the man of to-day. Politics 
is with us a far less ardent and attractive field now 
than then. It lacks, at present, the inspiration of 
opposition to slavery. We all felt before the war 
(those of us who dared dream of such an event) 
that the abolition of slavery would make the 
country happy and perfect. And during the war, 
how looked then, in the future, the vine and fig- 
tree under which the victors should one day cool 
themselves ! How we heard the distant church 
bells ringing, and saw far away the piping times 
of peace, and the wide, brooding land grown 
happier for ever. 

It has all come to pass. Our dreams have been 
more than fulfilled. We are rich and free, and 



192 Our Latest Notions of Republics, [xm. 

wield a silent influence such as perhaps no other 
country wields. But we have attained to this 
only to find ourselves much duller, and no nearer 
perfection than before, and to again confront tasks 
of Herculean difficulty. In our pursuit of principles 
which are new and true, we had forgotten some 
that are old and equally true. We now call to 
mind that no State can be happy in which there 
are not wise and good men to direct and teach, 
and in which other men are not willing to learn. 
We have entire confidence in cur republican suc- 
cess, and we know that, great as our difficulties 
are, kings and lords cannot help us. It will come 
right in the end, we are sure, with higher and 
wider education, and that recognised supremacy 
of an educated class which we once had, but 
which we threw away. But our task is so grave 
that we have little time or inclination for sympathy 
with the impatience of otner countries. 



English Conservative Temper. 



The English Conservatives have rather a temper 
than a poHcy. In describing a Conservative, there- 
fore, it is far more important to observe him than 
to attempt a diagnosis of his opinions. He is 
the balky horse of the team. And yet he is the 
balky horse in front of a car that must go on. 
Rear and plunge as he may, he must get ahead, 
or the single-trees will be upon his heels. The 
hard pulling has always been done by the Liberal 
horse, the Tory steed trotting on sullenly by his 
side. As soon as the Liberal animal stumbles or 
shows signs of fatigue, the balky horse at once 
begins to plunge in the most indignant and con- 
temptuous manner, and to indicate to the charioteer 
that if the coach is to proceed that stupid beast 
must be unhitched. The Tory steed (which has 

O 



194 E^igUsh CGiiservative Temper, [xir. 

really considerable mettle and energy), finding 
himself .the sole reliance of the vehicle, strains 
forward with all the strength he can commiand. 
But the poor beast is nearly exhausted with the 
struggle before the car has been got over a few 
feet of ground. The Liberal horse must be again 
called in ; sullenly the unhappy beast resumes his 
reluctant jog. But we must not despise the Con- 
servative horse. He has his uses. He is a good 
war horse. When the car of state becomes an 
artilleryman's carriage, he rattles it over the stones 
in fine style. To change the figure somewhat, he 
is no beast to carry on his back a tax-gatherer or 
an educational reformer, or social philosopher 
who turns his toes out. But when a soldier gets 
astride of him he becomes a serviceable animal. 

The Conservative party in England has always 
been the party of objection and the party of 
defeat. It has its important uses. It teaches 
caution to those whom too much success would 
render over confident. The flippancy, the jaunt- 
ing, joking tone of men who think it scarcely 
worth while that they should condescend to be 
serious — that tone into which the successful majority 



x[v.] English Conse7'vative Temper, 195 

in our own civil struggle fell after the war was 
over — an English party is rarely allowed to reach. 
The evil to which men are prone as the sparks 
fly upward is much too inevitable a matter to 
permit the Conservative function to become an 
obsolete one. It guards a wise and good impulse 
from the old age of Solomon. The Conservative 
party has, moreover, accidental allies in the caprice 
of the people, in all sorts of rumours and humours. 
There was evident in the recent crisis an irritable, 
wilful disposition for change, as if the people were 
tired of looking at Gladstone. They were like 
untutored listeners at a concert of classical music ; 
they enjoyed none of it, but when the orchestra 
was playing they wished it was time for the sing- 
ing, and when the prima donna was at her solo 
they wanted the fiddles to begin again. But the 
Conservative party must always be beaten. The 
idea of reform has taken a permanent hold of the 
English mind. All parties agree that progress is 
the principle of government. The rankest Tory 
in England holds that freedom should broaden 
slowly down from preced_ent to precedent. He 
only sticks at the particular reform. Reform is 



196 English Conservative Temper, [xiv.. 

a good thing : but he . thinks that you must not 
increase the suffrage, and you must not have the 
ballot, and you must not disestablish the Irish 
church. In a word, the Conservative party must 
always have a policy at war with the necessary 
and inevitable principle in the life of the state. 



English and Americmi 
Newspaper-writing. 



The decorum which is characteristic of Enghsh 
papers of the best class resides not so much in 
the men who conduct them as in the audience to 
which they are addressed. Were not such deco- 
rum required from the outside, persons without 
education and breeding would be sure, sooner or 
later, to iDCgin to write in papers ; indeed, educated 
and well-bred men would soon cease to write 
without decorum. It must be a man of uncommon 
virtue and strength of judgment, who will write 
in accordance with the principles of good sense 
and good taste, unless those principles are pretty- 
well defined by society. What may and what 
may not be said are pretty well understood by 



198 English and A^nerican [xv. 

writers in England. The feeling of the limits put 
upon them checks many a low impulse, dilutes the 
gall dripping from many a pen ; while the con- 
sciousness of a critical audience represses the 
gush, folly, and pretence which impose upon the 
ignorant. The best papers of England are read 
by tradesmen, and perhaps by mechanics. But it 
is not the tradesmen and mechanics who compel 
the papers to take their sensible and decorous 
tone. The barristers, the clergy, and the educated 
men in general of England do this, and the mer- 
chants and mechanics acquiesce. The English 
have a larger class than we of men who ask of 
any proposition or measure if it be true or right, 
rather than if it be useful. Here, one is more 
apt to belong to a clique, or to have an axe to 
grind, or to have interests other than those of, 
opinion in the matter. Interested criticism, indeed, 
is that heard everywhere most commonly ; but it is 
still true that the number of men who care for 
truth and justice, simply as truth and justice, is 
smaller here than in England. An educated 
Englishman, in expressing his opinion upon a 
question which concerns his country and another 



XY.] ^ Newspapei^'Wriiing, 199 

country, will usually profess to exclude the con- 
sideration that England is his country. I say 
** profess;" of course, he will not always — perhaps, 
not often — do it, but an American will scarcely 
profess to ignore his interest in the matter. This 
is largely because higher education is more diffused 
in England than here. Then it is true that edu- 
cation necessitates a certain degree of honesty. 
Even if the conscience of an educated and able man 
does not make him truthful, the clearness of his 
perceptions will often render it difficult for him to 
be false. One evening, sitting in the gallery of the 
House of Commons, I heard a striking example of 
that candour in which educated men delight. An 
opponent of the Government was upon the floor. 
He was upbraiding the ministry for selling arms 
just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian 
war, at which event, he averred, nobody was or 
could have been surprised. This was a round- 
about way of intimating that he was not surprised, 
and that he was a person of some foresight. Mr. 
Lowe rose, and before proceeding to the matter of 
the speech, dismissed the orator as follows : " Mr. 
Speaker, the only criticism I have to make upon 



200 English and American [xv. 

the gentleman is, that he expects everybody to be 
as clever as himself. Because he descried in the 
future the terrible war that has ravaged Europe, 
saw Metz, saw Sedan, the capitulation of the 
emperor, the fall of Paris, the Commune, and all 
the rest of it, he thinks that I should have seen 
all this too. Now, in all humility, I assure him 
that I never expected anything of the sort. Mr. 
Speaker, the whole thing has been a complete 
surprise to me." The wit and truth of this were 
irresistible. 

Of course, there is wonderfully little stuff In the 
usual editorial page of the usual high-class English 
paper. For that matter, it is inevitable that there 
shall be very little stuff in the editorial page of 
almost any paper. The writing about this country 
is very poor : it is not, as a usual thing, hostile or 
spiteful ; it is rather feeble and inaccurate. The 
best writers, those most ambitious really to com- 
prehend the country, shoot wide of the mark. In 
one way they have studied us pretty well. They 
have read the " Federalist," Madison's papers, &c., 
and have quite a notion of State's rights and the 
Monroe doctrine. But of the moods of the country 



XV.] Newspaper-writijig, 201 

and its physiognomy, of our public opinion and its 
factors, they know Httle, and, as a rule, write ill. • A 
man born and reared here, and accustomed to think 
about his country, will detect constant little diver- 
gencies from the truth. The pen of the writer is 
incessantly glancing from reality, by spaces which 
it would be difficult to define, and yet of which it 
is impossible not to be conscious. Sometimes we 
are treated to columns of pure guessing. But the 
mass of English writing about America we should 
describe rather as the " wishy-washy compli- 
mentary." The chief editor of a journal says, 
" America is a great country, and she must have 
to-day a portion of our space." Accordingly, soi'ae 
young gentleman is selected to maunder down a 
column of loose, uncertain comment, which is r«ot 
to offend the Americans, who are touchy, nor to 
tell the truth of them, of which last article they are 
in possession of very little. 

But when we turn to our own papers, we find 
the editorial articles feebler than the English ones ; 
while the propriety, scholar-like manner, and sem- 
blance of fairness of the English press are gene- 
rally wanting. And here I have an opportunity to 



202 English and Amejdcan [xv. 

speak of the affectation and insincerity so com- 
mon in American editorial writing. 

An editorial should be written to inform the 
people concerning some question of the day, or 
to counsel the public as to the course to be pursued 
concerning it. A newspaper writer should speak 
as if he were in a deliberative assembly, and the 
question under discussion were to be voted upon. 
How often does he so speak } Read through the 
usual editorial, and ask yourself, " Now what shall 
I do .'' " You find that you are as much in the 
dark as ever. Suppose the Modoc war is to be 
written upon. The gentleman or lady sits down 
-to the task, talks in a most superior manner, and 
earns his or her ten, twenty, or thirty dollars a 
column, whatever it may be, to the entire satisfac- 
tion of the managers of the paper. But now take 
the article to the Government authorities, and let 
them educe a policy from it. The public func- 
tionary must read a long time before he will dis- 
cern whether or no he is to hang Captain Jack ; 
whether, indeed, he is to do or to refrain from 
doing anything in particular. 

It is the faith of many newspapers that the 



XV.]. Newspaper -writing, 203 

people do not like sense and information ; that 
they prefer nonsense or commonplace which has 
the appearance of originality. Now I think that the 
" average man " is very well contented with either. 
He likes sense and information, if they are not 
put in such a way as to tire or shock him. He 
is willing enough to put up with commonplace 
which imitates originality, for he finds nothing to 
object to in the commonplaces, and he has not 
sufficient confidence in his own judgment to 
detect the counterfeit originality. But it is a 
mistake to imagine that there is always a popular 
demand for any foolish fashion of writing which 
happens to exist. That very lack of discrimina- 
tion which marks the uneducated man renders him 
quite as ready to accept sense as nonsense. But 
as nonsense only is given him, he accepts non- 
sense. Who is he that he should set up his opinion 
against persons who express themselves in such 
fine and confident words, whose sentences are 
printed in such elegant type, in papers sold at 
such grand hotels, and scattered by the thousand 
in such great cities .? What is known as a popular 
demand might be more accurately described as 



204 English and American [xv. 

a popular acquiescence. It seems very formidable 
when we think of the immense number of persons 
who form it; but then it is only skin deep. In- 
stead of a popular state of mind being, as we 
are apt to think it, a recondite and almost inscrut- 
able matter, it is oftener the result of an obvious 
and even contemptible cause. Instead of there 
being a deep-seated and characteristic taste with 
which public caterers must comply, the fashion is 
often given the people from above. After the 
, fashion is fixed, men write in accordance with it, 
and explain its existence by the fiction of a 
demand. The qualities at which editorial writers 
may aim are sense, thoroughness, and good taste. 
Now and then they may be eloquent, and now 
and then they may be witty. But wit and 
eloquence must be the incidents, and not the 
staple, of an editor's Vv'ork. If we try to have 
it otherwise, at the best we can only have sham 
wit and sham eloquence, which are not only false, 
hurtful to the writer and hurtful to the reader, 
but must be quite as firesome as honest common- 
places. 

It is natural that an editor should be more 



XV.] Newspaper-writing, 205 

anxious that his I'abour appear good than be good. 
He has special temptations to this sort of work. 
He is paid less for the inherent than for the 
apparent value of his contributions. A lawyer's 
work is good when he wins his case, a doctor's 
when he cures his patient ; but there is no such 
test for the work of an editor. " Do people like 
to read it?" is the ultimate question; and what 
people like to read cannot easily be known with 
certainty. As we are confident, however, that 
sense and thoroughness mu^t be acknowledge^!, 
we marvel that writers are not more willing <o 
rely upon honest work and to be content wi/h 
it. But that is the last thing they are willii'g 
to rely upon. They must have an out-of-the-w«''\y 
title. They must torture the jaded humour in^o 
some feverish antics. They must put their tru^t 
in affected wisdom and affected fine moral senti- 
ments. One peculiarity of their way of writing 
is a certain tone of infinite knowingness. A fact 
is told you, but it is patenthetically insinuated 
that the writer's general knowledge of the sub- 
ject is simply boundless. Is he to write upon 
the Eastern question, and has he heard for the 



2o6 English and American [xv. 

first time of General Ignatleff, he begins as follows : 
" Well, in spite of the wily Russian who repre- 
sents the Czar in Constantinople," &c. Very few 
of the English papers, except the vulgarest, exhibit 
this peculiar form of nonsense in their treatment 
of questions of politics ; but the best papers occa- 
sionally do something very like it in their criticisms 
of art and literature. The imitators of these critics 
in this country are, however, quite even with them. 
A friend of mine, who is an editor, sent me a book 
of poems to review, with the request that I should 
make the article "dignified." I knew very well 
what he meant by this prescription. I was to talk 
as if I were not only familiar with the subject in 
hand, but with pretty much every other. I was 
to be very confident ; here and there derisive, here 
and there ecstatic, but always absolute ; and each 
paragraph, as I left it, was to stand up and quiver 
with a gelatinous consistency, galvanised by the 
energy of my mind and hand. 

One would naturally wish to speak only when 
one can speak strongly, and with precision and 
certainty. The seemly man is he who is silent 
when his thought is immature. He is not likely 



XV.] Neivspape^'-writing. 207 

to oiTend his own self-esteem, nor to lower him- 
self in the opinion of the clear-sighted. But the 
seemly silent man and the unseemdy speaker 
are alike immature. We merely see the one state 
of mind, while we do not see the other. One 
confesses the mental condition, which the other 
equally possesses. So long as the speaker does 
not lay claim to a certainty which he has not, 
he is really as good a man, and, if not so seemly, 
as dignified as the other. It is one's duty at 
times to write ill. A newspaper contributor must 
constantly write upon subjects of which his know- 
ledge is imperfect, and of which his opinion is 
immature. It cannot be otherwise. And why 
should writers wish to make it appear otherwise t 
You consult a paper with the same intent with 
which you ask the opinion of an intelligent friend. 
You do not wish your wiser friend to decide the 
matter for you ; you ask him to throw light upon 
it. If he has no definite opinion to give you, 
you wish the stimulus of a common sympathy 
and a common curiosity. You ask the same 
of a newspaper. The writer need not be omnis- 
cient ; if he be eager and interested the reader 



2o8 English and American Nezuspapers, [xv. 

will be eager and interested. The disposition in 
newspapers to appear wiser than they are is 
therefore not only immoral, but, I believe, inex- 
pedient. 



Americans Abroad. 



Many sorts of Americans are to be seen in Europe. 
There are those who live there and have a hold 
upon society. These are the privileged few ; and 
some of them are very nice people and do us 
credit. But even these are not quite so nice 
and certainly not so useful and considerable 3.s 
if they lived at home. For a foreigner is always 
at a disadvantage. He is tied to the country in 
which he is resident neither by his past nor by 
his future, and is therefore not important to it. 
Even an eminent foreigner cannot hold abroad the 
place he has at home. He has done something in 
his own country, and is of some value there ; he 
will be apt to be of very little value elsewhere. So 
that it is certainly true that a man loses in social 
density by having his residence in a land other 

p 



2IO Americans Abroad, [xvi. 

than his own. Men who desire achievement and 
consideration should live at home. No country, 
not even our own, is hospitable to foreigners as 
such ; our ladies are glad enough to have a count 
at their houses, but I never hear that they put 
themselves to much trouble to seek out young 
strangers who are over here making their way. 

But there are certain other Americans (and this 
class is much larger than the foregoing) who count 
upon their fingers the grafs and princes they know. 
They are very unhappy people. Their unhappi- 
ness does not consist in the illusive and unsatis- 
factory nature of the phantoms they pursue so 
much as in the agonising self-inquiry of which 
they are the subjects. They never cease to 
interrogate themselves with one form of ancient 
question, "What am IV They ask not "Am 
I virtuous.?'' "Am I right.?'' but "Am I genteel.?" 
" Do I possess that peculiar constitution of mind 
which, in the illustrious circles of the Old World, 
makes me ' one of them } ' " This question is never 
answered. If it were only a tangible society the 
inquirer was in search of, his condition would not 
be so wretched ; he is condemned, however, to 



XVI.] Americans Abroad, 211 

imitate the pursuit of the dog who ran round after 
his own tail. Alas, if men could but devote to 
the pursuit of goodness and knowledge the sensi- 
tiveness of conscience, the earnestness, the profound 
desire and dissatisfaction with which they ask to 
be genteel ! 

Some thirty years ago the English were the great 
travellers of Europe. They overran the Continent. 
Many of these tourists were of a sort to make 
Frenchmen and Italians wonder what manner of 
men the English were. But the fact of such people 
getting abroad was altogether to the advantage of 
the English. Persons of corresponding position on 
the Continent would never have got beyond their 
own thresholds. Of late years, however, the 
Americans send abroad more travellers and 
spend more money in foreign lands than any 
other people. Wealth having in this country, far 
more than in England, lost significance, any sort 
of people here go abroad. It is greatly to the 
credit, or, at least, to the advantage of this 
country, that such people can prosper and be 
happy. It is true, however, that we have very 
often cause to be ashamed of our brethren in 



212 Americans Abroad. [xvi. 

Europe. Why is it that Americans look so much 
' worse abroad than at home? The truth is, I 
suppose, that we see a worse class than we see 
at home, or see more of them, and that we see 
them under circumstances which are not in their 
favour. 

As I have before said, any foreigner is seen at a 
disadvantage in a country not his own. He is 
especially at a disadvantage, if he lacks social 
education. He is amid circumstances to which he 
f. is not accustomed, and if there is any vulgarity in 
him it is sure to come out Indeed, if he have 
none, he is likely to adopt a little for present use. 
A civilised instinct is possibly the cause of some of 
his mistakes. He is alone, would like acquaint- 
ance, and is not judicious in his advances. There 
are some things which the wariest traveller will 
have to learn. One is that it will not do to be 
candid ; an Englishman, Frenchman, or German 
quite as much objects to be told anything ill of his 
i/ countiy as an American. A foreigner should 
admire ; even guarded and discriminating praise 
from him is not usually acceptable. I believe 
that one other mistake with which an American 



XVI.] AmerHcaits Abivad, 21 



J 



goes abroad for the first time is, that because he 
lives in an important country he is entitled to more 
respect than men who live in smaller countries like 
Holland or Belgium. A little thought should teach 
him that this cannot be ; that one's nationality 
must be, of course, a very small ingredient among 
the considerations that go to make up his pre- 
sentibility. Is he good-looking, is he rich, well- 
mannered, amusing, learned, clever.? These are 
the questions which society asks, and not, "What 
is his country .?'' But an American's chief danger 
in Europe is that his energy and want of occupation 
may hurry him into improprieties and vulgarities. 
I know it is true that Americans who have lived 
long about the European capitals, and who have 
nothing to do, are not energetic people. There are 
many of our countrymen, loiterers in the foreign 
cities, who have learned to suffer in silence the 
ennui and stupefaction which idleness generates. 
Never having learned the pleasure of labour, and 
fancying that they cannot work as other men do, 
they give themselves up to an unhealthful indo- 
lence, of which they do not admit to themselves 
even the wretchedness. I have seen a man kept 



214 Americans Abroad, [xvi 

out of Paris by circumstances he could not control, 
varying the monotony of existence in the fol- 
lowing manner : One day he has his chop at 
Simpson's in the Strand, and his supper at the 
Pall Mall Restaurant ; the next he has lunch 
at the Rainbow (calling for porter which he does 
not like, but which he understands should be had 
at the Rainbow) ; in the evening he dines at the 
Blue Post and has whitebait. So he goes on from 
day to day, exhausting one by one the experiences 
of the universe. 

But the usual American abroad is not this sort 
of man, and has temptations of a different kind. 
The more he is able to rest the better for him. 
One danger is that his impatience and activity 
will carry him into scenes livelier than the above, 
but not so moral. Especially he should beware 
of too great a desire to know the world and to 
"study society .■'' Every reader is familiar with 
that strong feeling of obligation resting upon 
him to acquaint himself with certain French 
novels ("an educated man should know these 
things ■'^) before he has read much more famous 
works of a less peculiar character. In the same 



XVI.] Americans Abroad, 215 

way it is surprising to find what opportunities for 
the student of man the casinos and other places 
of the kind seem to afford. It is not unusual to 
see at the Argyll, just when the dancing is the 
wildest, and the dull electricity in the atmosphere 
the most palpable, the really honest traveller from 
America — a Sunday-school teacher, likely — "sur- 
veying mankind from China to Peru,'' &c., and 
looking on with a countenance expressive of 
edification and enlightenment. I had here better 
amend a remark made above. I spoke of the 
innocent and dull delights of certain feeble idlers. 
I meant to pass no encomiums upon the morality 
of American idlers in Europe. The tendency of 
the sort of life led by these persons, especially 
when unmarried, is to produce a certain type of 
man of which one sees a great deal — a sort of 
cross between a roiLe and an old maid. 

It is certainly true that our people do not look 
to such advantage abroad as at home. I presume 
the reason of that is, in part, that here we form 
intimate acquaintanceships with people whom we 
like, and these stand for America to our minds 
and " wall us out '' from the inferior sort we meet 



2i6 Americmis Abroad. [xvi. 

abroad. What a delight it is for the sojourner in 
a foreign land to meet a really charming American 
family, with beauty, sense, refinement, and kind- 
ness ! These people are happy to see the fine 
things Europe has to show them, and will be 
happy, likewise, to go back to the land which their 
absence has made lonely. I have no words to 
offer such as these. But other good persons, with 
minds less firm and hearts less refined, may reflect 
with advantage to themselves concerning the 
manners and the state of mind with which to 
travel. 



Society in New York and Fiction. 



I HAVE heard young persons who contemplate 
writing an American novel, or who are interested 
in the literature of this country, speak of the 
material there is in New York society for the 
writer of fiction. It seems to be thought that 
certain people living among us may be made to 
have, as members of society, an interest separate 
from that we feel in them as men and women. 
A great many good and amusing books have been 
written about London and Paris society ; why may 
not such books be written about New York 
society? Now I wish to show that there is no 
society in New York which corresponds to that 
of London or Paris, and that any writer who 
attempts to make the idea that there is the key- 
note of his work will be likely to produce a silly, 



2i8 Society in New York and Fiction, [xvii. 

vulgar book. Apart from the harm to the writer 
of such a misconception, it is not well to be putting 
into the heads of people, the country through, 
notions which have no actual truth. And be it 
observed that I am now discussing only a question 
of fact. Whether or no there should be such 
societies, or whether, where they exist, they do 
good or harm, I do not say. I only say that 
there is no such society among us, and that 
novelists should not write as if there were. But 
the fact is not of literary importance only ; if it 
be a fact, it should be recognised and accepted by 
the country. 

It would be difficult to discuss this subject 
without some reference to democracy, the" triumph 
of which in this country has been so complete. 
There are yet some unreasonable discriminations 
concerning employments among us, but it is 
certain that the movement of public sentiment 
has been strongly and rapidly towards democracy. 
There was, during the early years of our existence, 
an approach to a national aristocratic society in 
this country. A governor or a senator, a judge, 
commodore, or a general, was an aristocrat. Any- 



xYJi.] Society in New York and Fiction, 219 

body who represented or reflected the dignity of 
government was an aristocrat. This feeHng con- 
tinued till near the middle of the century, or until 
the second generation of statesmen had dis- 
appeared. It has gone now " where the woodbine 
twineth/' to use the significant expression of the 
significant Jim Fisk. The extreme weakness of 
the aristocratic element among us at present is in 
part — in very small part — to be explained by the 
want of respect in our people. A plain man in 
this country cares nothing for the man who is 
above him ; is rather proud, and believes it to 
be a virtue, that he does not care. Nor does 
it appear a thing to be regretted that such a 
state of mind exists in the humbler citizen towards 
the greater one. It is well to have A admire B, 
if B is a person of superior rectitude, energy, and 
intelligence. But what advantage will it be to 
society to have A admire B because B lives in 
a better house, and may have a better dinner 
than A.? 

There is no need to put the cart before the 
horse. The value of veneration among the masses 
of men is obvious where they have anything to 



2 20 Society in New York and Fiction, [xvii. 

venerate. And there can be no want of the 
capacity for respect among our people. Some 
story now and then is told which discloses the 
vast reverence in which Hamilton and Jefferson, 
and later, Clay and Webster, were held by 
the Americans of their time. " Break up the 
great Whig party,^' said Webster on one occasion, 
"and where am I to go?" I remember to have 
heard my father, who was an old-line Whig and 
an adherent of Webster, say that Webster admired 
Isaiah. The impression made upon me at the 
time was very distinct. I thought how conceited 
the prophet would be were he only aware of the 
great man^s eccentric partiality. 

A writer has spoken of this country as one in 
which superiorities are neither coveted nor re- 
spected. That is not true ; real superiorities are 
certainly respected. The few that we have are, 
perhaps, respected too much. Americans having 
acquired the just idea that Mr. Emerson is a great 
man, proceed to let him do their thinking for them. 
The bulk of our reading people know enough to 
recognise what is excellent, but have not the 
critical self-confidence which is the property of 



XVII.] Society in New York and Fiction. 221 

educated men. They therefore fail to insist upon 
the fact that the greatest men have their Hmita- 
tions and cannot include everything, but in a kind 
oi dazed reverie, like that of a patient in typhoid, 
accept whatever is told them. So it is not true 
that there is a want of respect among people in 
this country to those who deserve respect; the 
contrary is the fact. 

The national aristocratic society has disappeared 
with the disappearance of respect for the politician. 
What is called " position " is in this country now 
altogether local. This is necessarily true. A is 
known among his neighbours as a rich and decent 
person ; his wife and daughters are " nice '' (the 
American for "noble''), either absolutely or rela- 
tively to the people about them. A has position, 
therefore, in his own town ; if he moves elsewhere 
he does not inevitably take it with him. Now, in 
very little and very simple communities, these ideas 
of position and precedence are not important. In 
a very great place, on the other hand, few men 
are large enough to be seen over the whole town. 
As a consequence, we see that New York is 
perhaps the most democratic town in the country. 



222 Society in New York and Fiction, [xvn. 

It has become so during the years in which it 
has been shooting into a position of such national 
and cosmopoHtan importance. It is now quite 
as democratic a place as the inevitable varieties 
of accident and talent among men will permit it 
to be. The artifice of exclusiveness, which is sure 
to succeed in a smaller place, will not do here. 
People greatly desire to do what they find difficult 
to do. They do not care at all to do what they 
know they may do. Accordingly, in a town, or 
city of moderate size, the people who wish to be 
thought better than their neighbours, and who have 
some little advantages to start with, are wise to 
keep to themselves. They thus prevent their 
neighbours from finding out that the excluded 
and the exclusives are just alike. They have for 
their ally that profound want of confidence of 
ordinary people in their own perceptions. But 
this is a device which will not do in a city of the 
size and wide-reaching importance of New York. 
What will some mover of commerce or politics 
over the face of the country care for the opinion 
of the gentlewoman round the corner, who thinks 
him vulgar ? 



XVII.] Society m New York and Fictio7t, 223 

Thus we see it to be impossible that any domi- 
nant society may exist in this country. The 
recognition of this fact should teach quiet to people 
inclined to be restless. It need not be unwelcome 
to the friend of man, for he will remember that 
democracy does not mean the triumph of utility 
over dignity and refinement, but that it means 
dignity and refinement for the many. Writers of 
fiction may regret the want of diversity and 
picturesqueness which the fact involves, but it is 
always well to know the truth ; if they desire to 
avoid vulgarity and the waste of such opportunities 
as they have, they must heed it. To make men 
and women interesting as members of society is 
denied them ; but should these writers have the 
wit to paint men and women as they are, the field 
is wide enough. There are on all sides people who 
are charming to contemplate, and whom it should 
be a pleasure to describe. 



THE END. 



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